Terahertz Microstrip Patch Antenna for Breast Tumour Detection

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among Malaysian women. It is critical to discover strategies to detect the tumour early on. Terahertz (THz) frequency provides excellent qualities for detecting tumours such as low photon energy and non-ionising radiation as compared to prior methods such as mammography, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that use optical to X-ray frequencies. The purpose of this work is to analyse and locate a breast tumour as well as to compute the maximum specific absorption rate (SAR) value. It was designed a THz rectangular microstrip patch antenna with an inset feed. To improve the antenna's performance, graphene was used for the patch and polyimide for the substrate. This antenna covered a bandwidth of 31.6 GHz and worked in the frequency range of 0.283-0.599 THz. To identify the location of a tumour, compute the SAR value, and localise the tumour, SAR simulation was used. The maximum SAR shifted to the tumor's position due to greater absorption rate around its tissue due to higher dielectric constant features. It was calculated that 1e-05g of average mass is required to be less than total tissue mass, which is 2.0063e-05g. SAR study revealed a maximum SAR value of 2.49391e+06 W/kg, which was not more than the overall absorption rate for human body safety. The SAR calculation result revealed that the tumour is within the range of the tumor's initial location

Photoacoustic tomography and sensing in biomedicine

Photoacoustics has been broadly studied in biomedicine, for both human and small animal tissues. Photoacoustics uniquely combines the absorption contrast of light or radio frequency waves with ultrasound resolution. Moreover, it is non-ionizing and non-invasive, and is the fastest growing new biomedical method, with clinical applications on the way. This review provides a brief recap of recent developments in photoacoustics in biomedicine, from basic principles to applications. The emphasized areas include the new imaging modalities, hybrid detection methods, photoacoustic contrast agents and the photoacoustic Doppler effect, as well as translational research topics

UWB Pulse Radar for Human Imaging and Doppler Detection Applications

We were motivated to develop new technologies capable of identifying human life through walls. Our goal is to pinpoint multiple people at a time, which could pay dividends during military operations, disaster rescue efforts, or assisted-living. Such system requires the combination of two features in one platform: seeing-through wall localization and vital signs Doppler detection. Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar technology has been used due to its distinct advantages, such as ultra-low power, fine imaging resolution, good penetrating through wall characteristics, and high performance in noisy environment. Not only being widely used in imaging systems and ground penetrating detection, UWB radar also targets Doppler sensing, precise positioning and tracking, communications and measurement, and etc. A robust UWB pulse radar prototype has been developed and is presented here. The UWB pulse radar prototype integrates seeing-through imaging and Doppler detection features in one platform. Many challenges existing in implementing such a radar have been addressed extensively in this dissertation. Two Vivaldi antenna arrays have been designed and fabricated to cover 1.5-4.5 GHz and 1.5-10 GHz, respectively. A carrier-based pulse radar transceiver has been implemented to achieve a high dynamic range of 65dB. A 100 GSPS data acquisition module is prototyped using the off-the-shelf field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on a low cost solution: equivalent time sampling scheme. Ptolemy and transient simulation tools are used to accurately emulate the linear and nonlinear components in the comprehensive simulation platform, incorporated with electromagnetic theory to account for through wall effect and radar scattering. Imaging and Doppler detection examples have been given to demonstrate that such a “Biometrics-at-a-glance” would have a great impact on the security, rescuing, and biomedical applications in the future