New Development Environment for Modern Bioelectromagnetics Signal Processing Applications [Application Notes]

Bioelectromagnetics is the study of the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) signals with biological systems. The most common area of investigation in bioelectromagnetics is the study of the interactions between EM signals and human tissue. With the recent advances in computational techniques, it has become easier to assess numerically the EM behavior within the exposed biological tissue model. There are extremely powerful computational techniques for solving bioelectromagnetic problems, and they have been employed successfully in the modeling of microwave applicators used in hyperthermia, in calculating EM signal absorption in human body models, and for the dosimetry of mobile handhelds. LabVIEW is a multithreaded programming language so that specific operations within a single application can be subdivided into individual threads, each of which can run in parallel. In other words, the block diagrams in LabVIEW are parallel programs.In this article, a LabVIEW development environment is designed to simulate a set of EM/biological tissue interactions. Two standard methods are presented to investigate the effect of EM radiation on the human tissue: the multilayered method and the finite-difference, time-domain (FDTD) method. The LabVIEW development environment provides a graphical user interface to the model that makes it easy to observe and modify the behavior of each element of the model.