Ann: Enhanced Algorithm Performance From Continuous Innovation, page-9

The on-going antenna improvement work being undertaken by Professor Abbosh's team also has the potential to improve the sensitivity and specificity of the EMU and First Responder. See below:

Non-Uniform Antenna Array for Enhanced Medical Microwave Imaging

by
Younis M. Abbosh
¹,
Kamel Sultan
^2,*,
Lei Guo
²
and
Amin Abbosh
1 College of Electronics Engineering, Ninevah University, Mosul 41002, Iraq
² School of EECS, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2025, 25(10), 3174; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25103174
Submission received: 14 April 2025 / Revised: 9 May 2025 / Accepted: 15 May 2025 / Published: 17 May 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwaves for Biomedical Applications and Sensing)

Abstract

A non-uniform antenna array is proposed to enhance the accuracy of medical microwave imaging systems by increasing the amount of useful information captured about the imaged domain without increasing the number of antennas.

These systems have so far been using uniform antenna arrays, which lead to highly correlated signals, limiting the amount of imaging information and adversely affecting diagnostic accuracy. In the proposed non-uniform antenna array method, the optimal number and positions of antennas are calculated with the aim of enhancing spatial diversity and reducing information redundancy.

The mutual information coefficient is used as a metric to evaluate and minimize redundancy between received signals. A microwave head imaging system is used to verify the proposed approach. The results of the investigated scenarios show that using a non-uniform antenna configuration outperforms a uniform setup in imaging accuracy and clarity, when using the same number of antennas.

Moreover, the reconstructed images demonstrate that using an optimized non-uniform antenna array with fewer elements can outperform a uniform array with more elements in terms of localization accuracy and image quality.

The proposed approach improves imaging performance and reduces system complexity, cost, and power consumption, making it a practical solution for real-world biomedical imaging applications.

Keywords:
medical microwave imaging; electromagnetic imaging; non-uniform antenna array; confocal imaging