Microwave technology for brain imaging and monitoring: Physical foundations, potential and limitations

This chapter provides an introduction to the physical principles underlying the adoption of microwave technology as a biomedical imaging modality for diagnosis and follow-up of neurological diseases and injuries (e.g., stroke, haematoma). In particular, a theoretical analysis, supported by numerical simulations and experiments, will be given to describe the physical constraints that arise in this kind of application and the relevant limitations. In addition, we discuss the main aspects to be faced when implementing microwave imaging technology in a clinical scenario, by exploiting a design procedure to determine the number of antennas needed to capture, in a non-redundant way, the largest part of the available data.