Improved Sensor for Non-invasive Assessment of Burn Injury Depth Using Microwave Reflectometry

The European project "Senseburn" aims to develop a non-invasive diagnostic instrument for assessing the depth and propagation of human burns in the clinical scenario. This article introduces an improved flexible microwave split-ring resonator-based sensor, as a new development in this project. The excitation system and the fabrication process are the major improvements with respect to its precedent microwave sensor, both based in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and copper. Both improvements are introduced together with the design of the sensor and of the experimental setup. Human tissue emulating phantoms are designed, fabricated, validated, and employed to emulate different burn depths and to validate the conceptual functionality of the proposed sensor. The Keysight dielectric probe 85070E is employed for the phantom validation. The analysis suggests that the sensor could estimate the burn depth. Future works will be carried out with ex vivo human tissues.