Development of Water Content Dependent Tissue Dielectric Property Models.

Abstract

We propose dielectric tissue property models dependent on both water and air content covering the microwave frequency range. Water is the largest constituent of biological tissues and its effect on the dielectric properties of biological tissue has been studied. However, dehydration effects due to thermal heating have not been fully characterized. We combined 1) Maxwell-Fricke mixture theory with a four-pole Cole-Cole equation to include water and air content dependency and as the second approach a different 2) Maxwell mixture model was coupled with a Debye function. The proposed approaches (1 and 2) were able to predict the permittivity (ε') and conductivity (σ) of bovine liver and swine lung tissues at different hydration and inflation states from 1-15 GHz. A second approach coupling Maxwell and Debye models required fewer assumptions and modelled tissue properties with higher accuracy (less than 15% mean percent error in all tissue types). These models may help improve the accuracy of microwave ablation simulation when tissue water content changes as a result of vaporization, and may facilitate personalized treatment planning.