Math paper explores new science, gets most downloads

“Reconstruction of planar Conductivities in subdomains from incomplete data” that was co-authored by Dr. Alexandru Tamasan made the top 20 articles fully downloaded earlier this year on the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics website.

This mathematical paper concerns a new noninvasive method to quantitatively measure the electrical conductivity in a body. The method combines two physical principles: the Maxwell equations at very low frequencies with a Magnetic Resonance techniques, and, unlike CAT-Scans would be harmless.

The paper builds on the new physical law (discovered by the authors in 2007) by allowing partial imaging from incomplete data. Unlike the case of the classical Electrical Impedance Tomography (which does not use MRI, but cannot provide images of good resolution), this method can recover the electrical conductivity in certain subregions where the data is known (you don’t need to scan the legs to image the brain).

It’s potential implications in the medical imaging are high since there are no harmless tests to distinguish benign from maligning tissue at incipient stages.