Abstract:
Recent trends show increasing cases of implantable devices for monitoring and
control of organs such as heart. The implantation of devices requires a multi stage
evaluation process in order to make sure that these devices do not pose any harmful
effects on the patients as well as to the surroundings. One important stage
is the evaluation of implants in medium, called phantoms, resembling human organs.
The phantoms can be heterogeneous or homogeneous mixture of different
materials. Conventionally, the general procedure in developing such mixtures is
to physically mix different materials in some arbitrary ratio, measure the electrical
properties, such as dielectric constant, of the resultant mixture using Vector
Network Analyzer and compare it with that of the actual human tissue involved
in the application, discard it if the electrical properties do not match and repeat
the process. This is obviously not a scientific approach and is highly cumbersome.
In this thesis, we have proposed a three step procedure that is fast and accurate
to develop human tissue phantoms based on FDTD method. At first, a software
model is developed that mimics human tissue involved in the application and then
a mixing approach is adopted that identifies the type and ratio of the materials
to be mixed a priori. The results obtained from software model and the mixing
technique compares favorably. As a last step, once the information about materials
and their ratios are known, the components can be physically mixed to get the
physical model of the human tissue.