Millimeter-Wave Tissue Diagnosis: The Most Promising Fields for Medical Applications

At the end of the 19th century, researchers observed that biological substances have frequency- dependent electrical properties and that tissue behaves "like a capacitor" [1]. Consequently, in the first half of the 20th century, the permittivity of many types of cell suspensions and tissues was characterized up to frequencies of approximately 100 MHz. From the measurements, conclusions were drawn, in particular, about the electrical properties of the cell membranes, which are the main contributors to the tissue impedance at frequencies below 10 MHz [2]. In 1926, a study found a significant different permittivity for breast cancer tissue compared with healthy tissue at 20 kHz [3]. After World War II, new instrumentation enabled measurements up to 10 GHz, and a vast amount of data on the dielectric properties of different tissue types in the microwave range was published [4]-[6].