Printed Monopole Antenna Designs for a Microwave Head Scanner

This paper introduces printed monopole antenna designs which are suitable for a microwave head scanner. The designs feature compact size and a wide bandwidth of operation which is relevant to microwave medical imaging applications (from 0.3GHz to above 4GHz). To assess the efficiency of these designs to operate as elements of microwave imaging (MWI) arrays, we first compare the signals received by an 8-element array of 150 mm diameter. The array is immersed in a lossy glycerine-water mixture medium which accounts for the strong attenuation that signals would experience when propagating inside the head.