amount of research conducted in EIT lung imaging. Furthermore, lung conductivity fluctuates intensely during the breath cycle which accounts for the immense interest of the research community to use EIT as a bedside method to visualize inhomogeneity of lung ventilation in mechanically ventilated patients. EIT measurements between two or more physiological states, e.g. between inspiration and expiration, are therefore referred to as time difference EIT (td-EIT). Time difference EIT (td-EIT) has one major advantage over absolute EIT (a-EIT): inaccuracies resulting from interindividual anatomy, insufficient skin contact of surface electrodes or impedance transfer can be dismissed because most artifacts will eliminate themselves due to simple image subtraction in f-EIT. This is most likely the reason why, as of today, the greatest progress of EIT research has been achieved with difference EIT. Further EIT applications proposed include detection/location of cancer in skin, breast, or cervix, localization of epileptic foci, imaging of brain activity. as well as a diagnostic tool for impaired gastric emptying. Attempts to detect or localize tissue pathology within normal tissue usually rely on multifrequency EIT (MF-EIT), also termed Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) and are based on differences in conductance patterns at varying frequencies. History The invention of EIT as a medical imaging technique is usually attributed to John G. Webster and a publication in 1978, although the first practical realization of a medical EIT system was detailed in 1984 due to the work of David C. Barber and Brian H. Brown. Together, Brown and Barber published the first Electrical Impedance Tomogram in 1983, visualizing the cross section of a human forearm by absolute EIT. Even though there has been substantial progress in the meantime, most a-EIT applications are still considered experimental. However, two commercial f-EIT devices for monitoring lung function in intensive care patients have been introduced just recently. A technique similar to EIT is used in geophysics and industrial process monitoring – electrical resistivity tomography. In analogy to EIT, surface electrodes are being placed on the earth, within bore holes, or within a vessel or pipe in order to locate resistivity anomalies or monitor mixtures of conductive fluids. Setup and reconstruction techniques are comparable to EIT. In geophysics, the idea dates from the 1930s. Electrical resistivity tomography has also been proposed for mapping the electrical properties of substrates and thin films for electronic applications. Theory Electrical conductivity and permittivity vary among biological tissue types and depend on their