An electric impedance tomography device with chest electrodes, a display and a control and analyzing unit to determine a time series of a global ventilation curve from the sequence of reconstructed matrices as a time series of the mean impedance change or of a measured respiration volume, to divide an inspiration or expiration phase into a number of steps of equal volume change, to determine the times corresponding to these steps, to determine the change in local impedance between these times for each image element, the ratio of this local change in impedance to the global equal volume change to form a local sequence of relative impedance changes of the image element as a function of the steps of equal volume change, to determine a scalar indicator characteristic as a function of the steps of equal volume change and to display each image element based on the respective scalar indicator.