Improving the Probability of Stroke Detection inside the Human Head Using Wideband Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

Abstract

This paper presents an imaging system based on ultrawideband microwave radars for the detection of bleeding regions and strokes inside the human head. The proposed system is portable and focuses on revealing bleeding areas with unpredictable shapes using polarimetric data acquisition. A custom-designed dual-polarized bowtie patch antenna capable of pumping the UWB pulses inside the patient’s head is designed and presented as the biomedical sensor for the system. The antenna dimensions are 25 × 25 m m 2 . It mitigates the mismatch between the air and skin needles of any coupling liquid, resulting in safe SAR levels below 0.5 W/kg and wideband operating bandwidth that covers 1.2-4.5 GHz with unidirectional radiations. To collect the raw polarimetric data, an elliptical array of the proposed antenna is formed around the patient’s head model that includes 16 elements in direct contact with the phantom. The performance of the proposed method is validated through an imaging scenario with two nonuniform bleeding areas inside the patient head model. The whole structure is simulated with a Gaussian pulse as the excitation using CST Microwave Studio tools. To produce 2D images of the voxel model, the time-domain elliptical synthetic aperture radar (ESAR) imaging algorithm is applied. Accurately detecting the presence and shape of anomalies in reconstructed images using the proposed method demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed system and determines its advantages over single-polarization systems.