Purpose: Physiological or pathological variation would cause a change of conductivity. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is favorable in reconstructing conductivity distribution inside the detected area. However, the reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem and the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image is relatively poor.

Approach: To deal with the problem, a regularization method is commonly applied. Traditional regularization methods have their own disadvantages. In this work, we develop an innovative hybrid regularization method to determine the conductivity distribution from the boundary measurement. To address the unwanted artifact observed in the total variation (TV) method, the proposed approach incorporates the TV method with the non-convex sparse penalty term-based wavelet transform. In the reconstruction, the sensitivity matrix is also normalized to increase the sensitivity of the measurement to the variation of the conductivity. The objective function is minimized with the split augmented Lagrangian shrinkage algorithm.

Results: The feasibility of the proposed method is evaluated by numerical simulation and phantom experiment. The results verify that the reconstruction with the proposed method is more advantageous, as obvious improvement is observed in the reconstructed image.

Conclusions: With the proposed method, the artifact can be effectively suppressed and the reconstructed image of conductivity distribution is improved. It has great potential in medical imaging, which would be helpful for the accurate diagnosis of disease.