Second-order topological expansion for electrical impedance tomography

Abstract. Second-order topological expansions in electrical impedance tomography problems with piecewise constant conductivities are considered. First-order expansions usually consist of local terms typically involving the state and the adjoint solutions and their gradients estimated at the point where the topological perturbation is performed. In the case of second-order topological expansions, non-local terms which have a higher computational cost appear. Interactions between several simultaneous perturbations are also considered. The study is aimed at determining the relevance of these non-local and interaction terms from a numerical point of view. A level set based shape algorithm is proposed and initialized by using topological sensitivity analysis.