Advancements in the Experimental Validation of a Wearable Microwave Imaging System for Brain Stroke Monitoring

Stroke is a disease that negatively affect brain oxygenation, so impacting short- and long-term people living conditions or, in the worst case, provoking the death. Brain stroke causes physiological variations in the affected tissues, which in turn produce relevant changes in the permittivity and conductivity of the involved tissues. Such changes can be detected and imaged by processing the scattering response at microwaves of the brain. This work advances the experimental validation of a microwave-based scanner to generate 3-D contrast dielectric maps, using low-complexity microwave hardware and a real-time standalone linear inversion algorithm based on the distorted Born approximation. The validation herein presented faces non-trivial conditions using anthropomorphic multi-tissue head and stroke phantoms, so replicating a labo-ratory set-up very close to the clinical scenario.