Design of a novel externally‐tapped intertwining helical antenna for microwave ablation and its statistical analysis on tissue model

Abstract

Cancer is the leading cause of death in recent centuries and microwave ablation (MWA) has been evolving to thermally treat cancerous tissue through cell necrosis and is also a promising substitute to radio frequency ablation. In this article, a novel normal-mode helical antenna based MWA probe is investigated for the effect on ablation diameter in the presence of five critical parameters. The antenna consists of an intertwining helix structure mounted on a very small ground plane. An external tapping is used to match the antenna impedance. In the proposed design at the center frequency, a reflection coefficient of more than 23 dB without insertion into the tissue model and a reflection coefficient of more than 14 dB with insertion into the tissue model have been observed at 5 GHz frequency. The gain and percentage bandwidth of the antenna is 0.6 dB and 10%, respectively. At 20 W power, a maximum ablation diameter of 32 mm (transversal-T) and 44 mm (axial-A) is reached within 5 min of application time at a distance of 30 mm from the probe. Further, the L27 Taguchi's orthogonal array has been employed to study the effect on ablation diameter by varying five thermo-electrical parameters. The outcome of Taguchi's analysis has been ranked according to the contribution of each parameter. Further, F- and p-value test has been employed using analysis of variance to study the significance of each parameter on ablation diameter.