Microwave Near-Field Dynamical Tomography of Thorax at Pulmonary and Cardiovascular Activity

Abstract

The developed near-field microwave diagnostics of dynamical lung tomography provide information about variations of air and blood content depth structure in the processes of breathing and heart beating that are unattainable for other available methods. The method of dynamical pulse 1D tomography (profiling) is based on solving the corresponding nonlinear ill-posed inverse problem in the extremely complicated case of the strongly absorbing frequency-dispersive layered medium with the dual regularization method—a new Lagrange approach in the theory of ill-posed problems. This method has been realized experimentally by data of bistatic measurements with two electrically small bow-tie antennas that provide a subwavelength resolution. The proposed methods of 3D lung tomography based on the multisensory pulse, multifrequency, or multi-base measurements are based on solving the corresponding integral equations in the Born approximation. The experimental 3D tomography of lung air content was obtained by the results of the multiple 1D pulse profiling by pulse measurements in several grid points over the planar square region of the thorax. Additionally, the possible applicability of multifrequency measurements of scattered harmonic signals in the monitoring of lungs was demonstrated by four-frequency measurements in the process of breathing. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed control in the diagnosis of some lung diseases.

Keywords

• medical-biological diagnostics
• tomography of lungs
• near-field microwave sounding
• inverse scattering problems