A microwave imaging technique for neck diseases monitoring

A microwave imaging approach for the diagnosis of neck diseases is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the case study of cervical myelopathy has been considered. The developed technique aims at retrieving the distributions of the dielectric properties of a cross section of the neck, from which information about the spinal canal size can be extracted. To this end, a new hybrid inversion procedure exploiting a qualitative delay-and-sum method together with a conjugate-gradient-like scheme developed in Lebesgue spaces has been used. The feasibility of the approach has been assessed by means of a prototype of measurement system equipped with ten bowtie-like antennas and using a simplified phantom. Preliminary experimental results are reported.