DEVELOPMENT OF MICROWAVE DEVICE FOR MATERIAL CHARACTERIZATION IN BIOMEDICAL APPLICATION

Cancer belongs to a group of fatal diseases involving abnormal cell growth and can potentially spread to the entire body. Amongst other types of cancers, Pakistan has the highest rate of breast cancer in Asia with every 1 in 9 women at high risk of breast cancer. Traditional and Novel technologies t

Project Title

DEVELOPMENT OF MICROWAVE DEVICE FOR MATERIAL CHARACTERIZATION IN BIOMEDICAL APPLICATION

Project Area of Specialization

Biomedical Engineering

Project Summary

Cancer belongs to a group of fatal diseases involving abnormal cell growth and can potentially spread to the entire body. Amongst other types of cancers, Pakistan has the highest rate of breast cancer in Asia with every 1 in 9 women at high risk of breast cancer. Traditional and Novel technologies to cancer treatment prove to be ineffective and at times dangerous to human health due to lack of adequate testing facilities for these solutions. Prolonged exposure to X-ray radiation which causes harmful ionization is just one example.

We are building a range of material characterization and testing devices will enable effective and safe treatment for Cancer by enabling the use of 3-D printed electronics for testing. A material characterization device helps determine different materials with coherent electrical properties. Once an appropriate material is found, it can be used in a 3-D printed phantom to mimic the properties of the actual biological organ. So, these 3-D printed electronics will mimic the behavior of real organs which will enable comprehensive testing of medical technologies for cancer treatment. This will allow accurate testing of existing biomedical solutions for cancer detection and treatment.

This material characterization solution will have a range of testing equipment including the cylindrical cavity resonator, transmitter line and free space methods. Dielectric materials measurement can provide vital insights on material parameters suitable for disparate applications. The demand for this device is not limited to biomedical applications but stretch to areas of Electronics, Aerospace, Defense and Agriculture. The study will investigate the use of scattering parameters measurement to retrieve the permittivity of materials over the wide range of frequencies.

The dielectric properties are of high use of in Electromagnetic (EM) medical technologies which are growing globally for disease identification and therapeutics. As these technologies are low-cost and minimally invasive, they have attracted significant research in recent years.

Project Objectives

1. To design and execute a microwave device to characterize materials based on their electrical properties.
2. To make material characterization device via different methods to create a one stop solution suitable for all applications.
3. To create the feasibility of a detailed market research for breast cancer detection using our proposed microwave imaging system.
4. To commercialize the Material Characterization system on a large scale for easy use in clinics and hospitals.

Project Implementation Method

The project has implemented into the following steps.

• First phase started with the complete literature review of different methods used for measuring material characteristics and electric permittivity of tissue.
• Second phase involved the simulation of these methods to find the resonant frequency of the material and to find the shift in frequency by place the testing material in the device.
• We will follow an iterative process to make a final prototype. After the completion first prototype results will be evaluated and a second prototype will be made. This process will be followed until satisfactory results are obtained.
• The resonant frequency will be obtained through NI PXIe-1078 vector network analyzer.
• After finding the resonant frequency and change in frequency, electric permittivity will be calculated by using MATLAB.
• Adequate material will be found for the construction of 3-D printed phantom for use in biomedical application.
• Device will be commercialized in hospitals and research centers as a one stop solution for material testing for use in novel biomedical applications.

Benefits of the Project

Our device will be of interest to various industries and disparate applications. However, we will primarily be focusing on working with the biomedical engineering sector. The uses for biomedical applications are summarized in the figure below.

The biomedical industry brings with it a myriad application where our device will be of suitable use including human tissue characterization,3-D printed phantoms, prosthetic and bio-implants, drug research, drug manufacturing and several other areas. Human tissue characterization is a novel area in which human tissue is assigned a specific quantity. In order to replace the human tissue, new materials will be found with identical electrical properties. The new materials will allow us to compute both highly accurate physical and computational models which will be used to judge the technical risk, efficacy and safety of commercially available medical equipment. For example, the safety Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) safety is validated based of the calculated Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). SAR is a complex function based on the dielectric properties of material. Examples from other industries include the aerospace and defense industry where new stealth air crafts, submarines and state of the art warfare equipment is being developed. This artillery is dependent on specialized wave absorbing materials which can be identified by our solution.

More Industries

Electronics

Aerospace/Defense

Industrial materials

Food and Agriculture

Forestry & Mining

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Main objective is to create the prototype of microwave device for material characterization in biomedical application including

• To design the microwave device to find the resonating frequency of empty device and resonating frequency when material is placed.
• Low Loss RF Cable to excite the resonator and Virtual Network Analyzer (NI PXIe-1078) to measure the reflection coefficient (S11).
• A software capable to compute the electric permittivity of the material through perturbation method as well as Quality factor.
• A phantom to mimic the breast tissue by making the composite material whose electric permittivity must be equal to the actual healthy tissue.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Medical

Other Industries

Agriculture , Food , Manufacturing , Health

Core Technology

3D/4D Printing

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Clean Water and Sanitation, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

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