Abstract
This paper deals with breast and head phantoms fabricated from 3D-printed structures and liquid mixtures whose complex permittivities are close to that of the biological tissues within a large frequency band. The goal is to enable an easy and safe manufacturing of stable-in-time detailed anthropomorphic phantoms dedicated to the test of microwave imaging systems to assess the performances of the latter in realistic configurations before a possible clinical application to breast cancer imaging or brain stroke monitoring. The structure of the breast phantom has already been used by several laboratories to test their measurement systems in the framework of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action TD1301-MiMed. As for the tissue mimicking liquid mixtures, they are based upon Triton X-100 and salted water. It has been proven that such mixtures can dielectrically mimic the various breast tissues. It is shown herein that they can also accurately mimic most of the head tissues and that, given a binary fluid mixture model, the respective concentrations of the various constituents needed to mimic a particular tissue can be predetermined by means of a standard minimization method.
Highlights
Due their non-ionizing nature and to the low cost and portability of the equipment, microwaves arouse a keen interest for biomedical applications
Between malignant and healthy adipose breast tissues; those that can be found between tumors and normal fibroconnective–glandular tissues are less than 10%, which renders the detection of such tumors with microwave imaging challenging
Their structures are made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and built up by additive manufacturing from STL files obtained by modifying original files available in the literature that describe anatomically realistic breast and head structures derived from MRI scans
Summary
Due their non-ionizing nature and to the low cost and portability of the equipment, microwaves arouse a keen interest for biomedical applications. Several studies have shown that, at these frequencies, the various human biological tissues show significant differences in their dielectric properties [1] This is the reason why, at the present time, a lot of work is devoted to biomedical microwave imaging, for breast cancer detection and brain stroke monitoring. In Reference [22], the dielectric properties of such mixtures were shown to be stable over time periods as long as 1 year Such a time stability is obtained by taking the precaution of extracting the TMMs from the phantom rigid structure required to contain and separate the TMMs that correspond to the different tissues, and to keep them away from light in sealed containers to avoid evaporation. Similar breast phantoms have been proposed [29,30,31]
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