A UWB sensor based on resistively‐loaded dipole antenna for skull healing on cranial surgery phantom models

Abstract

After craniotomy, the monitoring of the skull healing progression is strongly needed to take a proper medical intervention. The CT scans is however currently used for follow‐up after craniotomy resulting in lack of an effective and safety problem. This research proposes an alternative for monitoring the skull healing using ultra‐wide band (UWB) antenna. For the healing of the skull surgical defect, a compact resistively‐loaded dipole antenna is designed and analyzed in terms of its performance in the time domain. The head phantoms having a wideband characteristic are fabricated and used as models for the skull healing process. To represent various mineralization stages, phantoms with various dielectric constants from hydrogel scaffold to the normal skull and their intermediate values are used. The UWB radar technique in the time domain is implemented in the healing process of skull injuries emulating cranial cavities that are made as part of craniosynostosis treatment. The measurement results at the defect area show that the variations in amplitude of the reflected pulse as the skull healing is progressed. The results obtained can contribute to the development of microwave‐based techniques as a preliminary study of a proof concept before clinical trial in the healing process after cranial surgery.

Wrapped ultra‐wide band radar sensor based on resistively loaded bow‐tie antenna for near zone sensing applications

“…In this regard, the impulse radar characterized by UWB pulse has widely utilized for near zone sensing applications. The applications in the vicinity of the targets can be included for not only medical applications, such as imaging of the breast tumor, imaging of the bleeding area for stroke, and assessment of bone mineral density, but also industrial applications such as ground‐penetrating radar (GPR), through‐wall penetrating radar, and foliage‐penetrating radar (FPR) …”

A Preliminary Research on Skull Healing Utilizing Short Pulsed Radar Technique on Layered Cranial Surgery Phantom Models

“…We have considered agar based phantoms because agar has the ability to preserve the water contained mixture as well described in [3,4,9]. The pure deionized water was utilized to make sure that the mixture is not affected by any chemical ions.…”

“…Here, we added the TX-151 (Balmar, LLC, Louisiana, USA) to improve the viscosity of mixtures because the agar and PEP cannot mix properly with each other. To make each tissue a homogeneous media, we considered the volumetric fraction of all tissues to reflect the multi tissue layers as one layer [3]. Each material of tissue mimicking phantoms was followed as shown in Table 1 to adjust the electrical properties of phantoms as similar to the reference, which is available in [10].…”

“…The craniosynostosis is a congenital disorder in infants in which one or more of suture lines have prematurely fused on skull layer before the brain has fully grown [1][2][3][4]. Here, depending on which suture lines have fused earlier, the craniosynostosis can be grouped such as sagittal synostosis, coronal synostosis, metopic synostosis, and lambdoid synostosis [3]. Due to fused suture lines, the intracranial pressure is increased resulting in abnormal head shape in the end.…”

“…After craniotomy, monitoring the healing stages during post treatment care is a very important issue to ensure proper medical intervention when needed [1,3]. In this regard the medical equipment has been tried to make a follow-up on post treatment care such as X-ray, computed tomography (CT), and even magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).…”