Fan Beam-Type CP-MCT with Microstrip Dipole Array Receiving Antenna

Chirp pulse microwave computed tomography (CP-MCT) was developed for visualization of permittivity distribution inside a human body (Miyakawa, 1993 and Bertero et al., 2000). Tissue characterization using one of the developed CP-MCT systems has been attempted to discriminate tumor tissues from the normal ones. Based on the dependence of temperature, sugar content, acid content and the other quantities on the permittivity value, non-invasive imaging of such physiological or biochemical quantities have also been attempted by using various phantom models of a human body and some real fruits. Now we need a practical model of CP-MCT in order to evaluate the performance in animal experiments. Thus we developed the high-speed model of CP-MCT that shortens the data acquisition time by adopting the fan beam geometry into the scanner. The scanner is consisted of a single transmitting antenna and 39 printed dipole receiving antennas. The newly developed scanner has excellent radiation characteristics even in the lossy bolus saline solution. It takes approximately 2 minutes to collect all projection data. The performance of the system such as a spatial resolution, data acquisition time and so on were evaluated under various measuring conditions to show the usefulness of CP-MCT in animal experiments