Dielectric Constant Measurements Using an Open-Ended Coaxial Probe and a Vector Network Analyzer -Edición Única

Abstract

Nowadays, acute leukemia patients who have finished a chemotherapy treatment have to remain under observation, being subjects of periodic bone-marrow extractions in order to know if re-incidence of the disease exists. This procedure is harmful, risky and expensive for patients, and it provokes big expenses in money and resources for health institutes. This work tries to simplify the leukemia-reincidence diagnostic reducing the time it requires and introducing the possibility of performing it without the need of an invasive biopsy, based on the fact that in presence of cancer, human tissues show an increase on the dielectric constant parameter. For this, a method that allows for measuring such electric parameter and that has already been studied for breast cancer detection was implemented, which makes use of an open-ended coaxial probe and a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). In this scheme, the probe is immersed in a bone marrow sample for obtaining reflection measurements of electromagnetic fields emitted by the analyzer. In order to estimate electrical properties of the tissue under observation, reflection measurements are processed by means of mathematical algorithms and electromagnetic simulations which were implemented within this work. In-vivo leukemia-reincidence detection will be possible by the use of micro-machined coaxial probes manufactured with emerging nanotechnologies. Non-invasive methods will be possible by modeling bone, muscle, fat and skin tissues as a whole, and by uncoupling their electromagnetic response from obtained measurements of the coaxial-probe in contact with the skin of a patient’s extremity