A study of adaptive meshing in FEM-CSI for microwave tomography

The use of finite element method (FEM) to discretize the differential operator in the contrast source inversion (CSI) offers several advantages over conventional integral-equation based CSI algorithms. One of the advantages of FEM-CSI is the ability to adaptively control the density of the triangular mesh within the inversion domain to increase the quality of the reconstructed image and to reduce the computational burden of the inversion algorithm. Here we present an example that exploits this advantage of FEM-CSI, providing a qualitative and quantitative analysis using several inversion results. The example selected is for an unbounded-region microwave tomography configuration under the 2D transverse magnetic (TM) approximation.