Digital Twins for Development of Microwave-Based Brain Tumor Detection

Digital twins for different healthcare applications are currently being studied actively since they could revolutionize research on customized and personalized healthcare and enable realistic evaluations of new medical devices and applications in early phase. This paper presents a study on the development of digital twins aiming to be utilized for the development of microwave technique-based brain tumor detection. Realistic anatomical models of the digital twins were designed based on magnetic resonance images (MRI) scanned from the brain with brain tumor. These twins aim to correspond to the human brain and brain tumor in terms of size, shape, and tissue dielectric properties. Furthermore, developed digital twins include both phantom models for measurement emulation as well as corresponding simulation models designed using electromagnetic simulation software. By using the developed digital twins, our aim is to evaluate microwave-based sensing technique for brain tumor detection. Evaluations were carried out using flexible ultrawideband (UWB) antennas which would be beneficial for practical solutions. Our simulation and emulation results show that microwave technique with flexible antennas has high potential for brain tumor detection.