2In this paper, the finite volume method (FVM) is introduced in detail for solving the electrical impedance tomography (EIT) forward problem. A new idea for constructing the primary and secondary elements in FVM is presented. Detailed comparisons between FVM and the finite element method (FEM), including the characteristic of the coefficient matrix and the precision of the results, are carried out under the same mesh system. It is shown that accurate estimates of the potential distribution can be obtained with an FVM solution.