Measuring material/tissue permittivity by UWB Time-domain Reflectometry techniques

A model for simulating reflections of ultrawideband (UWB) pulses in multilayered tissue structures, has been implemented and verified using commercially available software. The permittivity of the different layers was altered sequentially and the corresponding reflections have been analyzed. Building on these experiments, the use of pulsed UWB is envisaged for the in-vivo measurement of complex tissue permittivity, in a non invasive way. Eventually, we will apply this technique to radiotherapy, trying to correlate the changes in permittivity with the absorbed radiation dose. A measurement setup using Time-Domain Reflectometry (TDR) is proposed.