Advanced 3D EM Simulation Environment for Development, Testing, and Usage of Medical Microwave Imaging Devices

Recently, microwave imaging has been envisioned as an important complimentary tool in medical diagnostics, besides golden standards in this field, such as CT scan and MRI. However, in order to achieve performances that qualify this technology to be translated from research bench to patient bedside, we need advanced 3D EM simulation environment. As a base for such environment we started from commercial, general purpose 3D EM solver WIPL-D Pro and its CAD variant. In addition, we added libraries of a) tissue properties, b) antenna models c) models of the antenna arrays/systems, d) models of parts of human body (phantoms), and e) scenarios that combine antennas and phantoms to emulate practical usage of microwave imaging devices. Special procedures/new options are developed to enable easy creation and fast and accurate analysis of new libraries' components. The effectiveness of such 3D EM simulation environment will be illustrated on a number of practical examples.