Diagnosis of a brain stroke using wideband microwave scattering

This paper presents a new computer-aided microwave monitoring system as a promising, portable and inexpensive tool to detect and localize brain stroke using a bank of a new wavelet-matched filters. The head is exposed to microwave radiation over the band from 1.1 to 3 GHz, and the backscattered signals at a hemi-elliptical array of 16 antenna elements surrounding the head are filtered to analyse the perturbation in the microwave signals from the brain. A novel technique is applied to remove the strong reflection from the air-skull interface as a way to estimate the target response and is compared with different techniques from literature to portray their role in the performance. The study results approve that the intensity and the distribution of wavelet energy and Shannon wavelet entropy in the filtered microwave signal, and the novel tool based on the distance between the wavelet energies at symmetric opposite antennas are promising candidate signatures for computer-aided detection and localization of a stroke.