Abstract
This work is devoted to the development and manufacturing of realistic benchmark phantoms to evaluate the performance of microwave imaging devices. The 3D (3 dimensional) printed phantoms contain several cavities, designed to be filled with liquid solutions that mimic biological tissues in terms of complex permittivity over a wide frequency range. Numerical versions (stereolithography (STL) format files) of these phantoms were used to perform simulations to investigate experimental parameters. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, a general methodology for the development of a biological phantom is presented. Second, this approach is applied to the particular case of the experimental device developed by the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications at Politecnico di Torino (POLITO) that currently uses a homogeneous version of the head phantom considered in this paper. Numerical versions of the introduced inhomogeneous head phantoms were used to evaluate the effect of various parameters related to their development, such as the permittivity of the equivalent biological tissue, coupling medium, thickness and nature of the phantom walls, and number of compartments. To shed light on the effects of blood circulation on the recognition of a randomly shaped stroke, a numerical brain model including blood vessels was considered.
Highlights
Microwave technology offers a low-cost, mobile, and non-ionizing diagnostic alternative modality for applications such as cerebrovascular disease monitoring or tumor detection
To obtain realistic phantoms it is crucial to get as close to the anatomy by using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or Computed Tomography (CT) scans to develop phantoms for imaging with MRI, CT, positron emission computed tomography (PET), single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT), and ultrasound [26]
In the microwave imaging domain, anthropomorphic head phantoms were developed by printing 3D molds intended to be filled with gel-based parts of the head [27,28] or mixtures based on graphite
Summary
Microwave technology offers a low-cost, mobile, and non-ionizing diagnostic alternative modality for applications such as cerebrovascular disease monitoring or tumor detection. Several research teams are working on this topic around the world and some imaging systems dedicated to these applications are emerging [5,6,7,8,9] The development of such imaging devices should help to improve prehospital diagnostic accuracy which is essential to decrease treatment time, thereby increasing survival and mitigation of injury [10]. For evaluation of these imaging devices, a set of experimental data is needed. Graphite powder and ceramic are some examples of different ingredients used to produce solid TMMs [29,30,47]
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