Microwave Chirality Imaging for the Early Diagnosis of Neurological Degenerative Diseases

TL;DR

This paper introduces a microwave-based imaging system to visualize protein chirality in the brain, aiming for early diagnosis of neurological degenerative diseases through non-invasive in vivo techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel numerical simulation method and imaging approach to detect chiral proteins in the brain using microwave transmission, enabling potential early diagnosis.

Findings

Numerical simulations show accurate mapping of chiral protein distribution.

The proposed method effectively detects chirality through cross-polarized microwave transmission.

Imaging results align with the distribution of chiral materials in the phantom.

Abstract

We propose a system to visualize the chirality of the protein in brains, which would be helpful to diagnose early neurological degenerative diseases in vivo. These neurological degenerative diseases often occur along with some mark proteins. By nanoparticle instilling and metamaterial technique, the chiral effect of the mark proteins is assumed to be manifest in microwave regime. Therefore, by detecting the transmission of cross-polarization, we could detect the chirality that rotates the microwave polarization angle. We developed a numerical method to simulate the electromagnetic response upon chiral (bi-isotropic) material. Then a numerical experiment was conduct with a numerical head phantom. A map of cross-polarized transmission magnitude can be reached by sweeping the antenna pair. The imaging results matches well with the distribution of chiral materials. It suggests that the proposed method would be capable of in vivo imaging of neurological degenerative disease using microwaves.