Abstract

Human tissue mimicking phantoms allow development of realistic emulations platforms which are essential for design of several biomedical monitoring and diagnosis systems. This first aim of this paper is to present a novel and durable fat tissue phantom for lower microwave frequency ranges 2.5–10 GHz. The phantom is developed from the liquid propylene glycol (pure) which we found to have similar dielectric properties as the fat tissue and hence, it is suitable to be used as liquid fat phantom. Development steps of solid fat phantoms with different trials are presented to provide insight how each ingredient affect on the dielelctric properties of the mixture. Additionally, phantom’s stability over time in terms of dielectric and physical properties are evaluated. The second main aim of this paper is to present a novel approach to verify the feasibility and reliability of phantoms in practical scenarios with tissue layer model simulations. In the simulations, the antenna reflection coefficients are calculated with tissue layer models in which the dielectric properties of the fat tissue layer is varied between the proposed prolyne glycol -based fat phantoms as well as real human fat tissue values. Our goal is to show how small differences in the dielectric properties of the phantoms affect on a practical scenario which is based on antenna impedance measurements. The dielectric properties of the proposed fat phantom have very good correspondence with real fat tissue especially in the range of 5 GHz-10 GHz. Also, at lower ultrawide band (3.1–5 GHz), the difference in dielectric properties is minor. The layer model simulations show that the differences in dielectric properties do not have significant effect when modelling the practical scenarios in the frequency ranges targeted for medical applications. Hence the proposed liquid and solid fat phantoms are suitable to be used in the emulation platforms of biomedical applications.