2020 Virtual undergraduate Research symposium

One Dimensional FDTD in Dispersive Media for Biomedical Imaging Applications


PROJECT NUMBER: 54

AUTHOR: Rachel Lumnitzer, Electrical Engineering | MENTOR: Atef Elsherbeni, Electrical Engineering

 

ABSTRACT

Debye modeling of dispersive, biological tissues allows for the numerical analysis of electromagnetic waves in the vicinity of a human body using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. This work focuses on providing the Debye coefficients for 55 biological tissues for a frequency range of 100 MHz to 100 GHz to support recent applications, especially for 5G systems. Many biomedical imaging applications require coefficients of higher, GHz and even THz range frequencies for successful detection of tumors. The relative permittivity and conductivity of each tissue is used to determine the three-term Debye expansion coefficients via a two-step numerical solver using built in functions in MATLAB. The Debye coefficients obtained precisely predict the complex permittivities of the experimentally available tissue data with maximum normalized errors of 3.047% and 3.958% over the specified frequency range. With these coefficients and the dispersive formulation of the FDTD method, many applications such as biomedical imaging, and the effects of radiation from 5G devices can be accurately analyzed.

 

VISUAL PRESENTATION

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rachel is a Junior at Colorado School of Mines and she is majoring in Electrical Engineering. She has been conducting undergraduate research with Dr. Elsherbeni for almost a year and hopes to pursue a Master’s degree in Antennas and Wireless Communication. Her research focuses on the electromagnetic wave interaction with biological tissues using the Debye model for dispersive media.

 


1 Comment

  1. Hello Rachel, your slides looked very nice and comprehensive of the project.

    This is more of my preference – but when slides have lots of content on them it is nice to break it up with some simple appear/disappear animations so the audience doesn’t become too overwhelmed by the information.

    It seems like you did lots of good work here and learned a lot, but that does not quite line up with the format of this presentation. With a limited amount of time, the audience would learn more from your presentation if it was further distilled to include the key points of your work. Developing a narrative could help you determine what are the important points and what information may not help convey that to the audience.

    It is better to have fewer slides and go into detail about what the data is showing and why that is significant, than to go through lots of information too quickly.

    Great job on your research and taking opportunities to present your work!

Share This