PANCREATIC AND KIDNEY PHANTOMS FOR THE EVALUATION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC SENSORS IN MONITORING THE COMPLICATIONS OF DIABETES AT 3.9 – 5.8 GHZ FREQUENCY RANGE

Abstract

Diabetes is a metabolic disease characterized by elevated blood glucose levels due to impaired insulin secretions, action, or both. According to the International Diabetes Federation “IDF”, diabetes affects almost 537milion adults aging between 20 and 79 years by the year 2021 with the highest prevalence in the Middle East and North Africa. Such metabolic disease can affect all body organs and lead to death if left untreated, but several treatments and precautions could be taken to render the development of such disease in the human body. The effectiveness of such actions is closely dependent on how early the disease is detected. Consequently, both devices designated to either treat or detect this disease are broadly developed and investigated and are referred to as biomedical devices. The fabrication of such devices has been greatly correlated with the utilization of electromagnetic technology. In other words, biomedical devices that require the recruitment of electromagnetic waves applied and/or received from the human body are facilitating and improving the detection and treatment of various diseases. Hence, the interest in studying the interaction of electromagnetic fields with biological tissues has been elevated leading to the need for models that can simulate the electrical properties of actual tissues. These simulated biological models are known as “phantoms” and aim to speed up and ease the process of verification and validation of biomedical devices. Diverse phantoms have been developed using different materials and targeting several tissues such as skin, muscle, fat, and breast tissues. This research is mainly concerned with the electromagnetic interaction between the various organs such as pancreas and kidneys with electromagnetic sensors. Since there is a lack in data studying the behavior of these two specific organs, electrical characterization (dielectric constant and loss tangent) and measurements of the latter are carried out. The data collected were compared and analyzed based on relevant information presented in literature. Following that, and according to what have been established, various attempts to develop pancreas and kidney phantoms are proposed within a frequency range of 3.9-5.8GHz. This report discusses the characteristics of, to our knowledge, first of its kind, fabricated phantoms that realized electrical properties equivalent to the actual either human or animal pancreas and kidney tissues. These phantoms are prepared in a semi-solid form using simple off-the-shelf materials that require simple procedures including, sunflower oil, deionized water, NaCl, dishwashing soap, and gelatin. In the present phantoms, relative permittivity and loss tangent almost equal to those of the biological tissues are realized over the frequency range of 3.9 GHz to 5.8 GHz. Furthermore, several samples for each successful phantom candidate were 3 fabricated, so the reproducibility of the proposed methodology, as well as the electrical properties maintenance of the proposed tissue-mimicking materials was investigated. Hence, projects that require actual pancreas or kidney organs for electromagnetic-based systems verification and design validation could simply use the proposed phantoms at their corresponding frequencies. On the other hand, even by simple adjustment in the composition of the several proposed models would allow simulating the dielectric properties of any other tissue type as a function of formulation across a frequency range.