Microwave Dielectric Property Based Stage Detection of Skin Cancer

Inherent discrepancy of dielectric properties between biological tissues has drawn considerable interest for the last 30 years. Open-ended coaxial probe is one of the promising methods to measure dielectric properties due to the non-destructive and broadband measurement characteristics. The advances in this method will improve the diagnosis and treatment processes in the medical industry. The aim of this study is not only to determine skin tumors but also to identify the cancer stages with open-ended coaxial probes. This will aid rapid an inexpensive diagnosis of skin cancer. To this end, we simulated a 2.2mm diameter open-ended coaxial probe, which is commercially available, with three-layered breast skin tissue and tumors with fifteen different volumes using Altair FEKO simulation software. The S-parameters of each configuration is simulated in the range of 500 MHz to 2GHz. Based on the simulated S-parameters, the results indicate that the first stage and healthy tissue shows a difference of 11.46 % at 1.5GHz. Similarly, there is a difference of about 39.48 % between the second and third stage. Skin cancer is considered critical at the third stage, therefore having a distinctive difference between dielectric properties and thus between the S-parameter response when the probe is terminated with second and the third stage tumor tissue will help in the detection of early stage skin cancer.