An electrical impedance tomography based flow monitoring system includes a flow accepting pipe having a cylindrical grid of m x n electrodes, wherein m is an integer greater than 3 representing a number of circumferential grid positions and n is an integer greater than 2 representing a number of axial grid positions. Each combination of adjacent circumferential grid positions and adjacent axial grid positions defines a cell having four electrodes electrically connectable in various combinations by a switch, and the switches are set to connect the electrodes into multiple axially-extending arrays. The system further comprises a controller coupled to the multiple axially-extending arrays to acquire multi-point electrical tomography measurements, wherein the controller processes the measurements to derive a monitored quantity.