Experimental Feasibility Study of Using Mmwave for Arterial Radial Displacement Monitoring

Abstract

Doppler Ultrasound as the gold standard for noninvasive arterial pulsation monitoring has limitations such as dependency on the operator and absence of acoustic window in some patients. Recently, mm-wave has been propounded as an alternative modality for biomedical diagnostics. However, heartbeat monitoring using mm-wave modality has been experimentally investigated only for external carotid artery, and its usage for deeper arteries has not been proved, yet. This study investigates the feasibility of mm-waves in the monitoring of non-superficial arteries. A continuous-wave (CW) reflectometer sensor is used for sensing pulsations exploiting the Doppler effect. The artery mimicking tube passes through an artificial agar-oil skin phantom. A peristaltic pump circulates the liquid through a tube. An antenna is placed in direct contact with the phantom without any coupling liquid. First, we investigate the optimum frequency of the given antenna in its impedance bandwidth [16][17][18][19][20]. Using the optimum frequency, the pulsation of an artery with a 1.6 mm diameter, placed in the depth of 16 mm, and has less than 0.02 mm radial oscillation amplitude was easily detectable.