Detection and localization of brain strokes in realistic 3-D human head phantom

Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide. The treatment depends on the location and extent of stroke and it should be started within 4.5 hours of the attack. Thus rapid detection is a must. Existing imaging systems do not provide a solution to monitor the patient in real time and not portable, thus requires patient's movement. Addressing these limitations, a portable diagnostic system is proposed in this paper employing monostatic radar approach using only one antenna covering 73% fractional bandwidth centered at 1.85 GHz. A realistic three-dimensional (3-D) head phantom is generated to simulate different stroke conditions. The phantom anatomically holds the structure of a real human head with frequency dispersive electrical properties of respective biological tissues of head that are rigorously fitted with fourth-order Debye model for the simulation environment. A confocal imaging technique is used to map the abnormalities inside the head. The obtained images indicate the potential of the presented technique to detect and locate the position of both hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes.