Muscle Rupture Microwave Imaging with a Lossy Gel to Reduce Multipath Interference

Imaging can make a difference in the diagnosis and management of athletes with muscle injuries, especially muscle injuries in the hamstring muscles where they commonly happen. Unfortunately, muscle injuries are often not diagnosed due to the cost and availability problems encountered when using conventional imaging methods. Microwave imaging could bring a solution to this problem and improve availability at lower costs. We have earlier presented a semicircular microwave imaging system made of monopole antennas embedded in lossy gel. The purpose of the lossy gel was to reduce direct coupling between antennas and thereby improve image reconstruction accuracy. In this work, we expanded the previous work by exploring different positions and object sizes of blood phantom targets immersed in a muscle phantom. The results showed that the reconstruction results were significantly more repeatable and accurate regardless of object size and position when a lossy gel was used instead of a non-lossy gel.