Gaddam, Sunil

Abstract Designing an effective antenna is very important to utilize microwave imaging. A high gain antipodal antenna designed with ultra-wideband frequency range is presented here. The simulated results are validated with measured data. The antenna can operate within the Ultra band frequency range of 3 to 8 GHz. The maximum gain of 2.96 dBi is obtained at 4 GHz. An experiment with biological tissues is also done to show the effectiveness of the antenna using as a resonator.

Microwaves are non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation with waves of electrical and magnetic energy transmitted at different frequencies. They are widely used in various industries, including the food industry, telecommunications, weather forecasting, and in the field of medicine. Microwave applications in medicine are relatively a new field of growing interest, with a significant trend in healthcare research and development. The first application of microwaves in medicine dates to the 1980s in the treatment of cancer via ablation therapy; since then, their applications have been expanded. Significant advances have been made in reconstructing microwave data for imaging and sensing applications in the field of healthcare. Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled microwave systems can be developed to augment healthcare, including clinical decision making, guiding treatment, and increasing resource-efficient facilities. An overview of recent developments in several areas of microwave applications in medicine, namely microwave imaging, dielectric spectroscopy for tissue classification, molecular diagnostics, telemetry, biohazard waste management, diagnostic pathology, biomedical sensor design, drug delivery, ablation treatment, and radiometry, are summarized. In this contribution, we outline the current literature regarding microwave applications and trends across the medical industry and how it sets a platform for creating AI-based microwave solutions for future advancements from both clinical and technical aspects to enhance patient care.

The search for non-invasive, fast, and low-cost diagnostic tools has gained significant traction among many researchers worldwide. Dielectric properties calculated from microwave signals offer unique insights into biological tissue. Material properties, such as relative permittivity (εr) and conductivity (σ), can vary significantly between healthy and unhealthy tissue types at a given frequency. Understanding this difference in properties is key for identifying the disease state. The frequency-dependent nature of the dielectric measurements results in large datasets, which can be postprocessed using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. In this work, the dielectric properties of liver tissues in three mouse models of liver disease are characterized using dielectric spectroscopy. The measurements are grouped into four categories based on the diets or disease state of the mice, i.e., healthy mice, mice with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) induced by choline-deficient high-fat diet, mice with NASH induced by western diet, and mice with liver fibrosis. Multi-class classification machine learning (ML) models are then explored to differentiate the liver tissue groups based on dielectric measurements. The results show that the support vector machine (SVM) model was able to differentiate the tissue groups with an accuracy up to 90%. This technology pipeline, thus, shows great potential for developing the next generation non-invasive diagnostic tools.