Passive temperature monitoring in realistic anatomical head models using microwave radiometry

摘要: Focused microwave radiometry, mainly used in clinical applications to measure in-depth temperature distributions inside the human body, may provide the capability of detecting local variations of temperature and/or conductivity at microwave frequencies of excitable cell clusters, such as in the case of brain tissues. In this paper, new aspects of our ongoing research regarding the use of focused microwave radiometry for brain intracranial applications are presented. More specifically, the beneficial use of lossless dielectric matching materials placed around anatomically detailed head models to improve focusing and detection is studied both theoretically and experimentally. The results show complete agreement of theoretical and experimental data; the system is able to sense thermal sources in human brain mimicking tissue with pre-specified detection depth and spatial resolution based on the operation frequency used. The results once again exhibit the systemís potential as a complementary brain imaging tool for in-depth passive temperature monitoring which could be clinically useful during hyperthermia sessions as well as to study the potential biological effects of mobile telephony.