Design and characterisation of wideband antennas for microwave imaging applications

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) are well known equipments used to generate images to aid in diagnostic procedure. However, the imaging equipments have some limitations whereby the equipments are very expensive and therefore, they are not always accessible in many medical centres. Besides, the equipments are bulky and less mobility. Moreover, existing CT cannot be used frequently on the human body because the scanner exposes patients to more radiations of ionised frequency. The limitations of the equipment create a need to design an alternative imaging method which is relatively low cost, small in size, has high mobility, and non-ionise frequency. This research is to design an antenna for microwave imaging, namely corrugated u-slot antenna at 1.17-5.13 GHz with the reference of S11 less than -10 dB. Two corrugated u-slot antennas; namely antenna 1 and antenna 2 are placed on a mirror side of skull phantom to examine their ability to detect an object inside the skull. VeroClear-RGD810 skull phantom containing water is used, and the obtained results are verified using ZCorp zp-150 skull phantom which has approximately similar permittivity. Both the antennas are tested to detect the object which is located at 40 mm and 80 mm from the respective examined antenna. An Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) technique is used to analyse the time domain reflection pulse according to the dielectric properties difference, as the electromagnetic wave propagates through the skull. The results show that the antenna 1 is able to detect the object faster than the antenna 2 for both skulls, due to inconsistent thickness of the phantoms. Furthermore, the antennas are fabricated in adjacent to measure decomposition and superposition specific absorption rate (SAR) in Specific Anthropomorphic Mannequin (SAM) head phantom at 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz. The maximum allowable SAR in head is 2 W/kg at 10 g contiguous tissue which is referred to International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guideline. Based on the measured results, superposition SAR of the antenna can reach up to ±12% of the maximum decomposition SAR. This research forms a significant contribution to medical engineering field in designing a corrugated u-slot antenna that serves to detect an abnormality inside human head at 1.17-5.13 GHz. The designed antenna satisfies the SAR standard, which is required in microwave imaging applications