Brain Stroke Monitoring via a Low-complexity Microwave Scanner: Realistic Multi-tissue Head Phantom Validation

The growing figures of brain stroke impact on the global population, especially in low-to-middle-income countries, and its severe short and long-term medical repercussions have raised the demand for additional technological solutions that support the specific medical needs and efforts against those. This work presents a tailored low-complexity microwave-based scanner designed for monitoring the after-onset stroke, and its experimental validation on anthropomorphic multi-tissue head phantoms, mimicking realistic clinical conditions. The system exploits microwaves’ non-invasive and harmless nature and the existing high performance microwave hardware and computing power to generate dynamically tridimensional qualitative maps signaling and tracking the stroke-affected areas. The hardware component consists of multi-view architecture using a 22-antenna helmet illuminating the studied domain with low-power electromagnetic waves working at around 1 GHz. To enable real-time operation with a low computing demand image formation is performed via a linear inversion algorithm based on the distorted Born approximation.