Abstract
IntroductionWhole-brain atrophy is one of the key symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinson. Monitoring the whole-brain atrophy is an important step to predict the stage of these diseases. Current diagnostic systems are expensive, bulky, and sometimes uncomfortable for patients to use. Microwave imaging systems are getting attention in recent years for head diagnostics due to being low-cost, portable, and nonionizing. ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to present a processing pipeline, composed of various steps including data acquisition, and an integrated image reconstruction algorithm for a microwave head imaging system that shows the level of atrophy as a way of monitoring neurodegenerative diseases. MethodImages for energy distributions are obtained by applying an integrated imaging algorithm, to backscattered signals obtained from an array of six fully-textile directional antennas placed in a hat-like structure on the head. Novel pre-processing techniques are applied to signals to remove clutter effects. The beamformer creates images of scattering signals in the head exposed to microwave radiation over 0 to 3 GHz of the frequency range. The algorithm is validated on real lamb brain phantoms that imitate whole brain atrophy. A measured amount of the lamb brain sample was removed uniformly around the outer layer and replaced with an artificial phantom that represents the Cerebrospinal fluid. Results and conclusionThe results show that the proposed method can detect and locate whole-brain atrophy with sensible accuracy. The proposed method can potentially be applied for real-time monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases.
Published Version
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