Experimental Validation of a Microwave Brain Scanner for Cerebrovascular Diseases Monitoring

Brain stroke is one of the most common diseases worldwide. Magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography are currently the two most assessed and reliable diagnostic tools, of great support to the clinicians. However, these devices are costly, time consuming and not portable, so that they are not appropriate for bedside monitoring. Hence, there is an increasing worldwide interest to develop complementary techniques to continuously monitor a patient after the stroke onset. In this paper, we report about the experimental testing of a novel device able to monitor cerebrovascular diseases, whose realization is based on microwave imaging technology. A 2-D version of the device has been fully experimentally tested and its 3-D version is under development.