Two-Step Iterative Medical Microwave Tomography

Zekun Zhang, Heng Liu*, Xiang Gao, Zeyu Zhang, Zhongxia Simon He, Luoyuan Liu*, Rui Zong, Zhizhen Qin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In the field of medical imaging, microwave tomography (MWT) is based on the scattering and absorption characteristics of different tissues to microwaves and can reconstruct the electromagnetic property distribution of biological tissues non-invasively and without ionizing radiation. However, due to the inherently nonlinear and ill-posed characteristics of MWT calculations, actual imaging is prone to overfitting or artifacts. To address this, this paper proposes a two-step iterative imaging approach for rapid medical microwave tomography. This method establishes corresponding objective functions for microwave imaging across multiple frequencies and conducts iterative calculations on images at varying resolutions. This effectively enhances image clarity and accuracy while alleviating the issue of prolonged computational time associated with imaging complex structures at high resolution due to insufficient prior information during iterative processes. In the electromagnetic simulation section, we simulated a three-layer brain model and conducted imaging experiments. The results demonstrate that the algorithm significantly enhances imaging resolution, accurately pinpointing cerebral hemorrhages at different locations using an eight-antenna array and successfully reconstructs tomography images with a hemorrhage area radius of 1 cm. Lastly, experiments were conducted using a medical microwave tomography platform and four simplified human brain models, achieving millimeter-level accuracy in MWT.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6897
JournalSensors
Volume24
Issue number21
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2024

Keywords

  • Born approximation
  • inverse scattering
  • microwave tomography
  • signal processing

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Zhang, Z., Liu, H., Gao, X., Zhang, Z., He, Z. S., Liu, L., Zong, R., & Qin, Z. (2024). Two-Step Iterative Medical Microwave Tomography. Sensors, 24(21), Article 6897. https://doi.org/10.3390/s24216897