Design and Full-Wave Analysis of Piezoelectric Micro-Needle Antenna Sensors for Enhanced Near-Field Detection of Skin Cancer

Abstract

Abstract-The design and full-wave analysis of piezoelectric microneedle antenna sensors for minimally invasive near-field detection of cancer-related anomalies of the skin is presented. To this end, an accurate locally conformal finite-difference time-domain procedure is adopted. In this way, an insightful understanding of the physical processes affecting the characteristics of the considered class of devices is achieved. This is important to improve the structure reliability, so optimizing the design cycle. In this regard, a suitable sensor layout is described, and discussed in detail. The major benefit of the proposed system stems from the potential for obtaining a superior performance in terms of input impedance matching and efficiency, in combination with an electronically tunable steering property of the near-field radiation intensity which can be profitably used to enhance the illumination and, hence, the localization of possible malignant lesions in the host medium. By using the detailed modeling approach, an extensive parametric study is carried out to analyze the effect produced on the sensor response by variations of the complex permittivity of the skin due to the presence of anomalous cells, and thus useful heuristic discrimination formulas for the evaluation of the exposure level to cancer risk are derived.

Study of Channel Characteristics for Galvanic-Type Intra-Body Communication Based on a Transfer Function from a Quasi-Static Field Model

“…The in vivo experiment set up, which was composed of a network analyzer and differential active probe (Agilent, 1141A Differential Probe), is shown in Figure 2(a) while the corresponding flow chart is displayed in Figure 2(b). Also the input impedance matching issues [29] related to changes of body electrical parameter can be ignored in Figure 1 because of our high input impedance (1 MΩ) of differential probe and operation of sub-MHz low frequency region. Then, the high input impedance bio-amplifier is utilized to extract the conduction current for further processing.…”

Non-Invasive Reflectometry-Based Detection of Melanoma by Piezoelectric Micro-Needle Antenna Sensors

“…As commonly done in the realm of ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications [8][9][10], the footprint can be determined as the normalized peak-value distribution of the electric field tangential along the observation plane z = −d ≥ 0, namely: numerically found that, for significant depths of observation in the skin, ρ F P tends to reduce as r g becomes larger. Although the computed maps are not shown here for the sake of brevity, this property can be readily inferred by considering the Fourier-transform relationship holding between a given aperture current distribution and the relevant far-field pattern [11]. So, one can conclude that the size of the footprint can be adjusted by varying the effective aperture of the structure.…”

“…9). The computed diagrams provide useful information in a reflectometry-based detection procedure of the skin cancer [11].…”

Effects of Electromagnetic Absorption Towards Human Head Due to Variation of Its Dielectric Properties at 900, 1800 and 1900 MHZ With Different Antenna Substrates

“…Research found that the risk of brain cancer doubled in adults with overuse of mobile phone and five times among youngsters [11]. Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) have stated that the mobile phone potentially leads to brain cancer [12][13][14][15][16][17]. The International Agency of Research Cancer (IARC) has grouped electromagnetic fields into Group 2B which is carcinogenic towards human.…”