Tissue-Mimicking Mixtures and Anthropomorphic Calcaneus Phantom for Bone Imaging Applications Take-Home Messages• This work presents tissue-mimicking mixtures to mimic the dielectric properties of skin, muscle, cortical bone, and trabecular bone. • Anatomically realistic phantoms must be considered as preclinical testing of the microwave imaging system.• The tissue-mimicking mixtures and the 3D-printed structures presented in this work can be used as a valuable test platform for a microwave imaging system for bone health monitoring. • The recipe of tissue-mimicking mixtures for cortical bone and trabecular bone is presented separately.• This study has proposed separate tissue-mimicking mixtures for cortical bone and trabecular bone.

Serverless computing offers an event driven payas-you-go framework for application development. A key selling point is the concept of no back-end server management, allowing developers to focus on application functionality. This is achieved through severe abstraction of the underlying architecture the functions run on. We examine the underlying architecture and report on the performance of serverless functions and how they are effected by certain factors such as memory allocation and interference caused by load induced by other users on the platform. Specifically, we focus on the serverless offerings of the four largest platforms; AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions and IBM Cloud Functions. In this paper, we observe and contrast between these platforms in their approach to the common issue of "cold starts", we devise a means to unveil the underlying architecture serverless functions execute on and we investigate the effects of interference from load on the platform over the time span of one month.

Microwave imaging can be used as an alternate modality for monitoring bone health. Dielectrically accurate, anthropomorphic phantoms play vital role in testing of imaging prototype prior to clinical applications. However, no study to date has proposed cortical and trabecular bone phantoms. This paper presents a multilayered 3D-printed human calcaneus structure. Further, we have proposed liquid based tissue phantoms that mimic the dielectric properties of skin, muscle, cortical bone and trabecular bone. Tissue phantoms are composed of Trition X-100, water and salt. The dielectric properties were measured across 0.5 -8.5 GHz. Each layer of the 3D-printed structure was filled with corresponding tissue phantom. The combined average percentage difference between dielectric properties of reference data and proposed tissue phantoms was found to be 2.9% for trabecular bone, 7.3% for cortical bone, 7.1% for muscle, and 8.7% for skin over the full measured frequency band. These tissue phantoms and 3D printed human calcaneus structure can be used as a valuable test platform for microwave diagnostic studies.

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