An Ultra-Wideband Compact Planar Antenna for Wearable Microwave Medical Imaging Applications

This paper presents a novel low-profile ultra-wideband antenna for wearable microwave medical imaging (MMI) applications. The proposed antenna has a monopole structure with two triangles and a few parallel slots cut at the bottom corners and top edge of the radiation patch, respectively, to achieve an optimized ultra-wide bandwidth and a smaller antenna size. The simulated and measured results show that the antenna prototype can realize a bandwidth of 93% from 0.9–3.0 GHz with a realized gain of 3.32 dBi. Furthermore, in order to verify the performance, we investigate the feasibility of classifying brain strokes between an intracranial haemorrhage stroke and an ischemic stroke with this antenna. The S parameter of the antenna varies significantly with the stroke types introduced (i.e., different dielectric constants), which demonstrates the applicability of the antenna for such use scenarios in MMI.