Tissue Mimicking Phantoms for Microwave Brain Stroke Imaging

Within the past decade, once limited biomedical application of microwave imaging started to expand from the breast cancer imaging to imaging of other anomalies. One such anomaly is the brain stroke where the application of microwave imaging is two folds. One application is the identifying the source of stroke that is to categorize whether the stroke stems from blockage (ischemic) or bleeding (hemorrhagic). The other possible application is the continuous imaging of the progression of hemorrhagic stroke during the post-acute stage. In this work, a phantom for emulating the dielectric properties of the lossy brain tissue is given for testing of the microwave devices for continuous monitoring. The recipe is simple and is composed by mixing carboxymethyl cellulose, ethylene glycol, and deionized water. The recipe is simple, has viscose texture, and can be easily composed. Dielectric property measurements and comparison with the literature data is given in this paper.