Integrated Ultra-Wideband Microwave System to Measure Composition Ratio Between Fat and Muscle in Multi-Species...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Food Science
• Microwave Engineering

Background:

• Accurate assessment of fat and muscle composition is vital for health monitoring and food quality control.
• Existing methods can be invasive, time-consuming, or costly.
• Non-destructive, rapid, and cost-effective solutions are needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a portable, ultra-wideband microwave system for quantifying fat and muscle composition.
• To assess the system's performance across diverse ex vivo samples.
• To establish the system's utility in biomedical and agri-food sectors.

Main Methods:

• Designed a handheld ultra-wideband microwave system (2.4–4.4 GHz) with integrated RF components and a dual-polarized Vivaldi antenna.
• Implemented a two-stage denoising pipeline (low-pass filtering, Savitzky-Golay smoothing) for signal enhancement.
• Utilized a random forest regression model trained on resonance frequency and signal-loss features for quantification.

Main Results:

• The system achieved high predictive performance with correlation coefficients >0.90 for fat thickness, muscle thickness, and fat-to-muscle ratio.
• Mean absolute errors were consistently below 3.5 mm across sample types.
• Accurate quantification was demonstrated in oil-water mixtures, pork, and beef, with higher variability in complex biological tissues.

Conclusions:

• The developed microwave system provides a portable, time-efficient, and non-invasive solution for fat and muscle composition analysis.
• Its low cost and multi-sample capability make it suitable for agri-food quality control and point-of-care diagnostics.
• The system enables rapid, non-destructive measurements without sample pre-treatment or anesthesia.