Experimental Comparison of Two Printed Monopole Antenna Designs for Microwave Tomography

This paper presents an initial experimental comparison of two custom-made printed monopole antenna arrays for microwave imaging (MWI). Data is obtained by using the MWI system in the presence of regularly shaped gel phantoms mimicking the dielectric properties of average brain and blood. The antenna array and phantom are immersed inside a 90% glycerol, 10% water mixture. Our in-house two-dimensional (2D) imaging algorithm is applied to the acquired data to test and validate the sensitivity of the system, and the value of using multiple frequency reconstructions enabled by wideband antenna operation is demonstrated.