POMPUS: An optimized EIT reconstruction algorithm. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-inverse imaging technique which aims to image the impedance of material within a test volume from electrical measurements made on the surface. The reconstruction of impedance images is an ill-posed problem which is both extremely sensitive to noise and highly computationally intensive. This paper defines an experimental measurement in EIT and calculates optimal experiments which maximize the distinguishability between the region to be imaged and a best estimate conductivity distribution. These optimal experiments can be derived from measurements made on the boundary. We describe a reconstruction algorithm, known as POMPUS, which is based on the use of optimal experiments. We show that, given some mild constraints, if POMPUS converges, it converges to a stationary point of our objective function. It is demonstrated to be many times faster than standard, Newton based, reconstruction algorithms. Results using synthetic data indicate that the images produced by POMPUS are comparable to those produced by these standard algorithms.