Mobile-controlled portable robotic measurement setup for microwave imaging diagnosis

This paper presents a low cost microwave system for medical diagnostics and treatment. The system consists of a wirelessly controlled automated data acquisition part using National Instrument (NI) MyRIO board and targets a portable microwave imaging (MWI) applications of the human body using a low cost robotic arm. The setup consists of a pair of Vivaldi antenna elements that act as transmitters and receivers separately, a vector network analyzer (VNA) and an CrustCrawler Robotic arm. The pair of Vivaldi antenna elements are held by a robotic-arm that scans in 3-dimensions with a user-defined sample program in LabVIEW-based graphic user interface (GUI) targeting the interested part of the human body using a WebCam based monitoring camera. A two port VNA sends and receives signals at each sample point and transfers the data back to a personal computer (PC) for further microwave signal and image processing. We have developed a scanning algorithm customised to our hardware setup. Analysis is carried out that show the efficiency of the algorithm in achieving the specific range and position requirements.