A microwave imaging-based technique to localize an in-body RF source for biomedical applications.

In some biomedical applications such as wireless capsule endoscopy, the localization of an in-body radio-frequency (RF) source is important for the positioning of any abnormality inside the gastrointestinal tract. With knowledge of the location, therapeutic operations can be performed precisely at the position of the abnormality. Electrical properties (relative permittivity and conductivity) of the tissues and their distribution are utilized to estimate the position. This paper presents a method for the localization of an in-body RF source based on microwave imaging. The electrical properties of the tissues and their distribution at 403.5 MHz are found from microwave imaging and the position of an RF source is then estimated based on the image. The method is applied on synthetic noisy data, obtained after the addition of white Gaussian noise to simulated data of a simple circular phantom, and a realistic phantom in a 2-D case. The root-mean-square of the error distance between the actual and the estimated position is found to be within 10 and 4 mm for the circular and the realistic phantom, respectively, showing the capability of the proposed algorithm to work with a good accuracy even in the presence of noise for the localization of the in-body RF source.