A Four-Layer Phantom for Testing In-Vitro Microwave-Based Sensing Approach in Intra-Cranial Pressure Monitoring

Multi-layer phantoms in proofs of concept, designs and validations of both microwave-based biomedical sensing and imaging system are becoming popular means to facilitate in-vitro experiments. In addition, they can contribute significantly to reduce animal use in scientific experimentation. In this paper, we design and fabricate a four-layer phantom composed of skin, skull, cerebrospinal fluid and brain mimic tissues to work between 2 and 3 GHz. In addition, the phantom incorporates a mechanism to produce pressure variation between the cerebrospinal fluid and the brain mimic tissues. This phantom is used in an in-vitro experiment to test and validate a new approach which could sense intracranial pressure variations through a microwave-based reflection method. The similarity of the phantom's tissues with human tissues from the viewpoint of the microwave response is analyzed in comparison with data from Italian Institute of Applied Physics in Florence. We found good agreement for the dielectric constant (Rel. Err. <; 13 % for 68% of significance) in skin, cerebrospinal fluid and brain mimic tissues. For the skin, we got also good agreement for the loss tangent (Rel. Err. <; 11 % for 68% of significance). The skull mimic phantom was stiff enough, but even presenting considerable errors, it was still good enough for the experiment. In addition, the capability of the phantom to operate at different pressures is discussed.