A generic technique to develop human tissue phantom

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.