Microwave tomography system for methodical testing of human brain stroke detection approaches

In this work, a prototype of a laboratory microwave imaging system suitable to methodically test the ability to image, detect, and classify human brain strokes using microwave technology is presented. It consists of an antenna array holder equipped with ten newly developed slot bowtie antennas, a 2.5 D reconfigurable and replaceable human head phantom, stroke phantoms, and related measuring technology and software. This prototype was designed to allow measurement of a complete S-matrix of the antenna array. The reconfigurable and replaceable phantom has currently 23 different predefined positions for stroke phantom placement. This setting allows repeated measurements for the stroke phantoms of different types, sizes/shapes, and at different positions. It is therefore suitable for large-scale measurements with high variability of measured data for stroke detection and classification based on machine learning methods. In order to verify the functionality of the measuring system, S-parameters were measured for a hemorrhagic phantom sequentially placed on 23 different positions and distributions of dielectric parameters were reconstructed using the Gauss-Newton iterative reconstruction algorithm. The results correlate well with the actual position of the stroke phantom and its type.