Millimeter-Wave Substrate Integrated Waveguide Probe for Skin Cancer Detection

This article presents an efficient and low-cost near-field probe, designed for early-stage skin cancer detection. Thanks to a tapered section, the device can achieve a sharp concentration of electric field at its tip. Moreover, the adoption of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology ensures...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering 2020-09, Vol.67 (9), p.2462-2472
Main Authors: Mansutti, Giulia, Mobashsher, Ahmed Toaha, Bialkowski, Konstanty, Mohammed, Beadaa, Abbosh, Amin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Cancer
Computer simulation
Dielectric constant
Electric contacts
Electric fields
Fabrication
Fats
Imaging
Impedance matching
Millimeter waves
millimeter-wave imaging
Penetration depth
Probes
Skin
Skin cancer
skin cancer detection
substrate integrated waveguide (SIW)
Substrate integrated waveguides
Substrates
Tissues
Tumors
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Summary:This article presents an efficient and low-cost near-field probe, designed for early-stage skin cancer detection. Thanks to a tapered section, the device can achieve a sharp concentration of electric field at its tip. Moreover, the adoption of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology ensures an easy and cheap fabrication process. The probe is realized on a high dielectric constant substrate (Rogers RO3210) that provides a good impedance matching with the skin, thus allowing to use the device in direct contact with it. This feature is essential to ensure that the proposed system can be adopted as a practical and effective tool for a fast scanning of many suspected skin regions. The probe is designed to operate at around 40 GHz in order to achieve the penetration depth required to detect small cancer lumps in the skin, while preventing the fields from interacting with the underlying biological tissues. Furthermore, the concept of detection depth is defined with the goal of introducing a metric that is more suitable than the penetration depth to express the notion of the maximum distance from the skin surface at which a tumor can be detected. Thanks to a differential imaging algorithm, the probe is capable of working on every different skin types and body region. The proposed device has a lateral sensitivity and detection depth of 0.2 and 0.55 mm respectively. The probe was designed and tested through simulations in CST Microwave Studio, as well as fabricated and validated through measurements on an artificial human skin phantom.
ISSN:0018-9294
1558-2531
DOI:10.1109/TBME.2019.2963104