Compact Unidirectional Conformal Antenna Based on Flexible High-Permittivity Custom-Made Substrate for Wearable Wideband Electromagnetic Head Imaging System

An approach toward designing and building of a compact, low-profile, wideband, unidirectional, and conformal imaging antenna for electromagnetic (EM) head imaging systems is presented. The approach includes the realization of a custom-made flexible high-permittivity dielectric substrate to achieve a compact sensing antenna. The developed composite substrate is built using silicon-based poly-di-methyl-siloxane (PDMS) matrix and microscale of aluminium oxide (Al₂O₃) and graphite (G) powders. Al₂O₃ and G powders are used as fillers with different weight-ratio to manipulate and control the dielectric properties of the substrate for attaining better matched with the human head and reducing antenna's physical size while keeping the PDMS flexibility feature. Using the custom-made substrate, a compact, wideband, and unidirectional on-body matched antenna for wearable EM head imaging system is realized. The antenna is configured as a multi-slot planar structure with four shorting pins, working as electric and magnetic dipoles at different frequency bands. The measured reflection coefficient (S11) shows an operating frequency band of 1-4.3 GHz. The time-average power density and the amplitude of the received signal inside the MRI-based realistic head phantom demonstrate a unidirectional propagation and high-fidelity factor (FF) of more than 90%. An array of 13 antennas are fabricated and tested on a realistic 3-D head phantom to verify the imaging capability of the proposed antenna. The reconstructed images of different targets inside the head phantom demonstrate the possibility of utilizing the conformal antenna arrays to detect and locate abnormality inside the brain using multistatic delay-multiply-and-sum beamforming algorithm.