In the shadow of X‐ray tomography and nuclear magnetic resonance tomography a new tomographic technique based on low‐frequency electric currents has been successfully developed in the past decade. Impedance computed tomography (ICT), although it gives poor spatial resolution images, is unmatched in certain cases. Two different approaches to the sensitivity analysis are presented in this paper. The direct differentiation method has been applied, but the adjoint variable method has not been used in ICT reconstruction algorithms until now. Some problems associated with the adjoint variable method of sensitivity analysis are discussed. The new algorithm is compared with the direct differentiation approach.