Compact Microwave Imaging System using Flexible Antenna and Differential Imaging Technique

This paper proposes a novel compact microwave based imaging (MWI) system for monitoring the evolution of diseases for personal applications. Limited by the size of the system, it uses one single ultra-wideband antenna and monostatic measurement configuration to obtain the scattered microwave signals from the human body. The monitoring of diseases is realized by differentially comparing diagnostic signals obtained from each measurement, i.e. only the difference in the scanned region between the current and the previous measurement is highlighted to indicate the progressing of the affected tissue. To evaluate the system, we simulate it in a real scenario to monitor the recovering progress of bone fractures, for which a body-mimicking phantom to emulate the dielectric properties of human bone and fat at microwave was also investigated and produced. The results show that the proposed system is capable of tracking the relative change of bone fractures for the monitoring purpose.