Computation of electrostatic fields in anisotropic human tissues using the Finite Integration Technique (FIT)

Abstract

The exposure of human body to electromagnetic fields has in the recent years become a matter of great interest for scientists working in the area of biology and biomedicine. Due to the difficulty of performing measurements, accurate models of the human body, in the form of a computer data set, are used for computations of the fields inside the body by employing numerical methods such as the method used for our calculations, namely the Finite Integration Technique (FIT). A fact that has to be taken into account when computing electromagnetic fields in the human body is that some tissue classes, i.e. cardiac and skeletal muscles, have higher electrical conductivity and permittivity along fibers rather than across them. This property leads to diagonal conductivity and permittivity tensors only when expressing them in a local coordinate system while in a global coordinate system they become full tensors. The Finite Integration Technique (FIT) in its classical form can handle diagonally anisotropic materials quite effectively but it needed an extension for handling fully anisotropic materials. New electric voltages were placed on the grid and a new averaging method of conductivity and permittivity on the grid was found. In this paper, we present results from electrostatic computations performed with the extended version of FIT for fully anisotropic materials.