Towards a low-complexity microwave imaging strategy for liver ablation monitoring

Thermal ablation represents an innovative treatment strategy for liver cancer therapy, having tangible advantages with respect to surgery. However, the main shortcoming, particularly crucial for microwave thermal ablation, is the necessity of monitoring in real time the treated region, so to provide information on the effectiveness of the treatment. Microwave imaging has been recently proposed as an effective tool for this goal, as it is capable of imaging the dielectric properties variations of liver tissues undergoing the ablation therapy. First investigations on simulated and experimental data corroborated the expected potentials. In this communication, a novel imaging approach able to work with a simplified measurement set-up is presented. The system simplification consists in a reduction of the number of antennas and in a measurement protocol which does not require any movement of the antenna array nor of the target under test. Preliminary results on experimental data are reported.