Wearable Electromagnetic Belt for Steatotic Liver Detection Using Multivariate Energy Statistics

A wearable electromagnetic belt system for the detection of hepatic steatosis (lipid accumulation within the major liver cells, hepatocytes), is proposed. To satisfy the requirements of the belt system, an array of body matched antennas is designed. The belt, which goes around the lower chest and over the liver, requires compact, wideband, unidirectional antennas that operate at low microwave frequencies. To avoid using conventional bulky reflector structures, the designed antenna utilizes the loop-dipole combination concept. To enhance electromagnetic wave penetration, the antenna is designed to match the human body. Thus, thanks to the high dielectric loading from the human body, the dipole element of the antenna is easily miniaturized. Since the same principle does not apply on the loop structure, meandered arc-shapes are employed to increase the effective electrical length of the loop. The final antenna design has a measured wide operating bandwidth of 0.58-1.6 GHz with a compact size of $0.096\times 0.048 \times 0.048\lambda ^{3}$ . The proposed structure is effective in irradiating the torso, where the signal can reach center of the liver at a depth of 90 mm, with 64% of the peak radiated power. An electromagnetic belt is built using twelve elements of the designed antennas. The belt is then tested on a 3D printed torso phantom that includes models of the lungs and liver. Due to close dielectric properties of the other tissues inside the torso, these are represented using an average tissue mimicking mixture with permittivity of 46. Measured data are analyzed using multivariate energy statistics method. A peak measured dissimilarity of 15.1% between steatotic and healthy liver is attained. These initial tests and obtained results indicate the potential of the proposed system as a method to diagnose hepatic steatosis.