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2526 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO.

5, MAY 2012

[12] K. G. Thomas and M. Sreenivasan, “A simple ultrawideband planar The Design of a Resistively Loaded Bowtie Antenna for
rectangular printed antenna with band dispensation,” IEEE Trans. An- Applications in Breast Cancer Detection Systems
tennas Propag., vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 27–34, Jan. 2010.
[13] K. B. Kim, H. K. Ryu, and J. M. Woo, “Compact wideband folded
Chan Hwang See, Raed A. Abd-Alhameed, Siau Wei Jonis Chung,
monopole antenna coupled with parasitic inverted-L element for laptop
computer applications,” IET Electron. Lett., vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 301–303, Dawei Zhou, Hussain Al-Ahmad, and Peter S. Excell
Mar. 2011.
[14] P. Nayeri, K. F. Lee, A. Z. Elsherbeni, and F. Yang, “Dual band
circularly polarized antenas using stacked patches with asymmetric
U-Slots,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 10, May 2011. Abstract—A resistively loaded bowtie antenna, intended for applications
[15] J. L. M. Campos and F. G. Fernandez, “Dual linear circular polarization in breast cancer detection, is adaptively modified through modelling and
patch antenna with broadband polarizer for 3.5 GHz WiMAX systems,” genetic optimization. The required wideband operating characteristic is
in Proc. Eur. Conf. on Antennas and Propag., 2009, pp. 380–383. achieved through manipulation of the resistive loading of the antenna struc-
[16] J. L. M. Campos and F. G. Fernandez, “Dual linear/circular polarized ture, the number of wires, and their angular separation within the equiva-
planar antenna with low profile double layer polarizer of 45 degree lent wire assembly. The results show an acceptable impedance bandwidth
tilted metallic strips for WiMAX applications,” Progr. Electromagn.
Res., vol. 98, pp. 221–231, 2009.
of 100.75%, with a VSWR 2, over the interval from 3.3 GHz to 10.0
GHz. Feasibility studies were made on the antenna sensitivity for operation
[17] C. H. Weng, H. W. Liu, C. H. Ku, and C. F. Yang, “Dual circular po- in a tissue-equivalent dielectric medium. The simulated and measured re-
larization microstrip array antenna for WLAN/WiMAX applications,” sults are all in close agreement.
IET Electron. Lett., vol. 46, no. 9, May 2010.
[18] G. Beigmohammadi, C. Ghobadi, J. Nourinia, and M. Ojaroudi, Index Terms—Genetic algorithms, impedance bandwidth, resistive
“Small square slot antenna with circular polarization characteristics loading, wire bowtie antennas.
for WLAN/WiMAX applications,” IET Electron. Lett., vol. 46, no. 10,
2010.
[19] [Online]. Available: http://www.cst.com/Content/Products/MWS/
Overview.aspx I. INTRODUCTION
[20] User Manual – PNA Series. Palo Alto, CA, Agilent Technology.
[21] R. N. Simons, Coplanar Waveguide Circuits and Components and Sys- The early detection of breast cancer in women is imperative for ef-
tems. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-interscience, 2001.
[22] T. Tsukiji, Y. Kumon, and M. Yamasaki, “Double-folded monopole fective clinical screening programmes, and successful therapeutic out-
antenna using parallel line or coaxial cable,” IEE Proc. Microw. An- comes in the event of a cancer being detected [1]. The use of mi-
tennas Propag., vol. 149, no. 1, pp. 17–22, Aug. 2002. crowave sub-surface radar as a medical imaging modality for breast
[23] C. L. Mak, K. M. Luk, and K. F. Lee, “Microstrip line fed L-strip patch cancer screening offers several distinct advantages over other technolo-
antenna,” IEE Proc.-Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 146, no. 4, pp.
282–284, Aug. 2002. gies [2]. The technique detects the contrast in dielectric properties be-
[24] A. J. Poggio and P. E. Mayes, “Pattern and bandwidth optimization tween normal and cancerous tissue efficiently, accurately and safely.
of the sleeve monopole antenna,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. This is made possible by the substantial advances made in imaging
AP-14, pp. 643–645, Sep. 1996. technologies [3], and by fully utilizing well established antenna and
[25] Z. N. Chen, Hirasawa, and K. K. Wu, “A broad-band sleeve monopole
integrated into parallel-plate waveguide,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory
RF sub-system technologies [4]–[6]. The final aim is a low cost system,
Tech., vol. 48, no. 7, pp. 1160–1163, Jul. 2000. which is easily adapted to the working clinical environment. This com-
[26] S. D. Rogers and C. M. Butler, “Wideband sleeve-cage and sleeve- munication concentrates on the design of compact ultrawideband an-
helical antennas,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 50, no. 10, pp. tenna elements. Such antennas are crucial to the successful operation
1409–1414, Oct. 2002.
[27] D. Valderas, R. Alvarez, J. Melendez, I. Gurutzeaga, J. Legarda, and
of a microwave imaging system, where they are required to transmit
J. I. Sancho, “UWB staircase-profile printed monopole design,” IEEE and receive a short transient pulse, with minimal distortion, and with a
Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 7, pp. 255–259, Mar. 2008. sufficiently low level of late-time ringing.
[28] X. L. Bao, M. J. Ammann, and P. Mcevoy, “Microstrip fed wideband Flared bowtie structures offer an excellent choice for the radiator el-
circularly polarized printed antenna,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag.,
vol. 58, no. 10, pp. 3150–3156, Oct. 2010.
ements, since they produce a non dispersive ultrawideband operating
[29] C. H. Chen and E. K. N. Yung, “Dual band circularly polarized cpw fed characteristic, are physically compact, and may be easily manufactured
slot antenna with a small frequency ratio and wide bandwidths,” IEEE at low cost. The input admittance and radiation characteristics of bowtie
Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 1379–1384, Apr. 2011. antennas are well known, and have been comprehensively discussed
[30] B. Y. Toh, R. Cahill, and V. F. Fusco, “Understanding and measuring
by Brown and Woodward [7]. One of their key findings was in the rel-
circular polarization,” IEEE Trans. Edu., vol. 46, pp. 313–318, Aug.
2003. ative positioning of bow tie antennas with respect to broadband per-
[31] Z. N. Chen, N. Yang, Y. Guo, and M. Y. W. Chia, “An investigation formance, lying between cylindrical monopoles and the corresponding
into measurement of handset antennas,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas.,
vol. 54, pp. 1100–1110, May 2005.
[32] K. L. Wong, Planar Antennas for Wireless Communication. New Manuscript received June 27, 2011; revised October 10, 2011; accepted
York: Wiley, 2003. November 19, 2011. Date of publication March 01, 2012; date of current
[33] Y. J. Guo, A. Paez, R. A. Sadeghzadeh, and S. K. Barton, “A circular version May 01, 2012.
patch antenna for radio LAN’s,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. C. H. See, R. A. Abd-Alhameed, and S. W. J. Chung are with the Mo-
45, no. 1, pp. 177–178, Jan. 1997. bile and Satellite Communications Research Centre, Bradford University,
[34] D. M. Pozar and B. Kaufman, “Comparison of three methods for the Bradford, West Yorkshire BD7 1DP, U.K. (e-mail: chsee2@bradford.ac.uk;
measurement of printed antenna efficiency,” IEEE Trans. Antennas r.a.a.abd@bradford.ac.uk; sinojonis@hotmail.com).
Propag., vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 136–139, Jan. 1988. D. Zhou is with the Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey, Guildford,
Surrey GU2 7XH, U.K. (e-mail: d.zhou@surrey.ac.uk).
H. Al-Ahmad is with the Electronic Engineering Department, Khalifa Univer-
sity, P.O. 573 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (e-mail: alahmad@kustar.ac.ae).
P. S. Excell is with the Glyndŵr University, Wrexham LL11 2AW, U.K.
(e-mail: p.excell@glyndwr.ac.uk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are avail-
able online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2189730

0018-926X/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE


IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012 2527

conical monopoles. Their work also detailed the variation of input ad- Considering these constraints, the following cost function was imple-
mittance and radiation characteristics versus electrical size. Of course mented for the optimization process
n
F=1 1 + w2 1 + ((f1 ) 0  )2
these investigations were for operation in free space, whereas the an-
w
n i=1 1 VSWR(fi )
tenna designs presented here must take the effect of the adjacent bio- (1)
logical medium into account. 1 c
Later work was conducted on the application of bowtie antennas in where

V SW R(fi ) = 1 + j0(fi )j and 0(fi ) = ZL (fi ) 0 Z0 :


pulsed transmitter design [8]. In order to radiate a pulse successfully,
the antenna should have a minimal late ringing time. This is usually
treated by introducing a resistive load to the radiator structure. For 1 0 j0(fi )j ZL (fi ) + Z0
bowtie antennas the internal reflections may be significantly reduced Within the cost function, w1 and w2 are the weighting coefficients, n
in this way, resulting in a notable expansion in the operating band- is the number of selected frequencies over the simulated frequency in-
width. Significant improvements were reported in [9], in which the terval, ZL (fi ) is the input impedance at the operating frequency (fi ),
solid bowtie structure was represented by a series of wires, and the (fi ) is the radiation efficiency at fi , and c is the reference radiation
antenna performance was selected from a genetic optimization of the efficiency. It should be noted that the radiation efficiency was com-
structural parameters. Such an approach could be easily adapted, at puted from the near fields which are located on an equivalent surface
least in principle, to include lumped elements, whilst preserving the enclosing the antenna’s geometry, and including the lossy dielectric
overall antenna geometry. This enabled further improvements to be medium. The size of this equivalent surface was 110 2 80 2 120 mm3 .
achieved with respect to the late-time ringing, however, the structures The antenna is placed on the xy plane, and at the center of the z axis.
proved difficult to fully realize in practice, with only limited measure- Several reference radiation efficiencies were set as objectives within
ment work being reported to date. the design optimization, ranging from 40% to 60%.
In this communication, these issues are directly addressed through Once the mutation rate, population size, maximum number of gen-
the design of a modified resistively-loaded bowtie antenna. The design erations, and possibilities are set, the algorithm randomly initiates its
strategy and the optimization goals are discussed below. In addition, population and converts the parameters of the individuals into a file
a practical realization is also presented, together with the results of a which is called by the electromagnetic source code, and the antenna
feasibility study on the antenna’s sensitivity in a lossy tissue-equivalent performance is calculated [4], [11]–[13]. These results are then fed into
dielectric medium. the genetic optimizer, and the resulting fitness landscape is evaluated.
This process is repeated until the target parameters satisfy the fitness
function.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN PROCEDURE
The genetic optimization implemented in this communi-
The antenna design presented here is based on the wire bow tie cation used the steady state approach. The parameter values
structure in [9] and extended work on this [4]. Earlier work in [4] in the algorithm were as follows: population size = 4;
only showed the simulated VSWR and the input impedance of the an- number of iterations (maximum generations) = 100; selection
tenna and no measurement results were discussed. In the present work, strategy—binary tournament; probability of crossover = 0:5;
the antenna size has been miniaturized, antenna geometry parameters probability of mutation = 0:02; number of possibilities =
have been optimized, corresponding to different distributions of the 32768 and percentage of parents’ population being replaced by
load resistors on the radiating elements and the simulated results have children = 90%. In addition, the weighting coefficients for VSWR
been validated with measured results. The main objective is to achieve (w1 ) and boresight radiation efficiency (w2 ) were set to 0.65 and
suitable antenna geometry, with consistent input impedance across the 0.35 respectively. These values were adopted for this present work
operating frequency, whilst also simultaneously minimizing late-time based on our past experience that was demonstrated in [11]–[13].
ringing caused by internal reflections within the radiator structure. Un- The total length of the antenna, and load impedance (obtained from
wanted reflections in the radiator structure are suppressed through the the optimizer) are 70.3 mm and 188
, respectively. The wire bowtie
addition of resistive loading. These various design goals were con- was discretized into N equal segments on each wire which constitutes
trolled through the application of a genetic optimizer: the physical mod- the antenna, and the wire radii were set at 0.5 mm. To understand the
elling in this design loop was carried out using the methods presented effectiveness of the number and values of the resistive loads to the
in [10], and the final design candidate was cross-validated through a cost function of the GA, an example of using GA to optimize the
transient analysis using CST Microwave Studio. The prototype antenna number and values of the resistive loads is shown in Table I. As can
was then constructed, and measured. be seen, by increasing the number from 1 to 6 the maximum fitness
In the optimization process, an in-house EM simulation algorithm of the cost function shows a progressive increase. However, when
[10] has been called through the cost function of the optimization pro- increasing to 7, the maximum fitness of the cost function shows only a
gram to compute the antenna performance. The genetic optimization small increment of 0.07; thus 6 resistors were selected instead of 7.
starts with the initialization of the variables and constraints, and the It was noted that the values of the resistors were related to the entire
target parameters are assigned to the cost function. Specifically, a can- bandwidth considered by the cost function, and hence their values will
didate structure is formed from the random selection of (a) the number be changed if the center frequency is changed or shifted.
of wires, (b) the flare angles between the wires (which vary continu- The resistive loading was achieved in practice through the use of
ously from 30 to 90 ), (c) the number and value of the resistive loads surface-mount resistors, and the optimized wire structure parameters
placed along the wires (which vary from 5 to 300
), (d) the length were transformed to a printed stripline antenna by adopting an equiv-
of the wires (which varies from 50 to 120 mm), and (e) the optimum alent surface area conversion. The width of the stripline was 1.57 mm,
matched load (which varies from 30 to 300
). With clinical imple- the gap between the radiating arms was 4.5 mm, and the gap size ac-
mentation in mind, the antenna is designed for operation in a dielectric commodating the selected resistors was 1.4 mm. At this stage a further
medium with relative permittivity 9.0 and conductivity 0.4 S/m, thus design optimization was required in the theoretical model to achieve a
emulating the electrical properties of the breast tissue at microwave realizable antenna structure. This analysis was performed through the
frequencies [2], [5]. Finally, the wings of the prototype bowtie struc- time domain using CST Microwave Studio. Fig. 1 shows the antenna
ture are connected to a common feed point at the center of the structure. geometry: the total antenna dimensions are 70.3 2 37 mm2 , three wires
2528 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

TABLE I
INPUT LOAD PARAMETERS, THEIR ASSOCIATED LOCATIONS AND OPTIMUM VALUES WITHIN THE MEDIUM " = 9:0, AND  = 0:4 S=m

Fig. 3. Practical prototype of proposed bowtie antenna.

Fig. 1. Geometry of the proposed bowtie antenna.

Fig. 4. Measurement setup for the resistive loaded bowtie antenna with scat-
terer.

Fig. 2. Simulated VSWR with different bowtie antennas.


of 4 GHz to 8 GHz. Following the addition of the resistive loads, the
antenna bandwidth expanded to accommodate the upper frequencies.
Moreover, within the tissue-equivalent medium, the dielectric losses
and six resistors are used, with the flare angle between the wires set at
38 . The optimum matched load is 188
. Again, in Fig. 1 the indexing
appear to contribute to an improved impedance matching characteristic
above the 8.5 GHz band.
from “1” to “6” represents the location of each of the resistive loads,
their corresponding values being 109
, 7
, 11
, 113
, 120
and
The prototype antenna shown in Fig. 3 was constructed using a low
219
.
loss flexible substrate. In this case Arlon’s “Foam Clad” material [14]
was used: the permittivity of this material is close to air, and varies be-
tween 1.15 and 1.30. Fig. 4 shows the experimental test bed used to
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION evaluate the practical performance of the proposed antenna. For sim-
The simulated VSWR performance of the unmodified antenna, oper- plicity, only half of the antenna is used and this is placed over a 50 2 50
ating in free space, was compared with the resistively loaded structure cm2 ground plane, operating as a monopole. It should be noted that
also operating in free space, and in the tissue-equivalent fluid: these ideally a uni-directional radiation pattern would be preferred for this
results are given in Fig. 2. The unmodified structure showed a lim- application; however, in this study, a monopole type antenna was im-
ited impedance bandwidth of approximately 26.42% for VSWR < 2 plemented and hence half of the power emitted travels away from the
(over 4.6 GHz to 6 GHz). This is not sufficient for the target interval target.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012 2529

Fig. 5. Simulated and measured S-parameters of the two proposed antenna con-
figurations.

To construct the simulated practical tissue model as used in [6],


[15], [16], the immersion liquid and fatty tissues are assumed to
have the same electrical properties as vegetable oil [17]–[19]. Thus
a 54 2 30 2 11 cm3 tank of rectangular cross section was filled with
vegetable oil. Unwanted and spurious reflections due to the ground
plane edges were minimized through the use of RF absorbent sheets.
An impedance matching transformer operating over the frequency
interval 3 GHz to 10 GHz was used to provide the conversion from 188

to 50
: the insertion loss was better than 1 dB. The input power
(5 dBm) used for the S-parameter measurements, target detection and
near field radiation patterns was obtained from the network analyzer
(HP 8510 C).
The simulated and measured S-parameter responses for the sub-
merged antenna are shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that there is close
agreement between the simulated and empirical data, with an input
reflection coefficient better than 010 dB. The detection sensitivity of
Fig. 6. Simulated (left) and measured (right) near field distributions for two
operating frequencies; Top: 4 GHz, Middle: 6 GHz, Bottom: 8 GHz.
the antenna may be assessed by observing the transmission coefficient
between two identical antennas, separated by a given face-to-face dis-
tance, in this case for an 80 mm separation, an average transmittance
of 046 dB was achieved, with 68 dB of transmission parameter
found to be around 10%: this figure is quite low but is to be expected
with this type of loaded antenna.
fluctuation for operating frequency band from 4 GHz to 8 GHz. This After validating the radiation characteristics of the antenna, the fea-
result is comparable with the results quoted in [5] for a dipole antenna. sibility of using this antenna to detect anomalous scattering centers
Fig. 6 illustrates the near field radiation characteristic of the antenna within breast tissue must be addressed. In the simulation model, the
at 4 GHz, 6 GHz and 8 GHz. The near field radiation pattern was candidate antenna structure is embedded within a 15 2 15 2 15 cm3
measured using a non-perturbing implantable E-field probe (model volume of the tissue equivalent medium. A spherical ball, of radius
EX3DV4, manufactured by SPEAG [20] and connected to an EASY4 5 mm, is positioned directly below the antenna feed, with a separa-
dosimetry metric assessment system). These fields were observed over tion distance of 3.0 cm, simulating a tumor with dielectric properties
the xz plane, for which a 20 mm minimum distance is consistently "r = 50:0, and  = 9 S=m. In order to verify the simulated result, a
maintained from the antenna. It should be noted that since the probe 1.0 2 1.0 cm2 metal plate was placed at a distance of 3.0 cm below the
is not calibrated for the vegetable oil, only the relative radiation excitation point to represent a dummy target for preliminary proof of
intensity is measured. In general, both simulated and measured near concept, as shown in Fig. 4. Fig. 7 illustrates the time variations in the
field patterns are consistent, and in acceptable agreement. However, normalized current components, with the scattering center located at
some discrepancies between the computed and empirical data can be 1.5 cm and 3 cm, respectively. It should be noted that these responses
attributed to reflections from the SMA connector and the boundaries are obtained from the subtraction between the residual response with no
of the tank, which are not taken into account in the simulation. The target and the actual response. Both the simulated and measured results
results are also quite comparable to those reported in [6], using a are well correlated, and indicate the presence of a peak current compo-
uni-directional antenna and slightly different medium properties. nent at 0.8 ns and 1.1 ns, for the scattering center at 1.5 cm and 3.0 cm,
The measured radiation efficiency across the operating frequency respectively. This indicates that the prototype has sufficient sensitivity
band in free space was between 18% and 26%; however the proposed for its intended application.
antenna was not designed to operate in free space. Therefore a further
test was performed to measure the radiation efficiency of the antenna
IV. CONCLUSION
in the lossy medium. For this particular configuration the distance be-
tween the antenna and the probe was kept at 8 cm. The average radia- A resistively loaded wire bowtie antenna was designed and opti-
tion efficiency of the antenna at this distance across the whole band was mized, using a genetic algorithm approach and some empirical inves-
2530 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

[7] G. H. Brown and O. M. Woodward, Jr., “Experimentally determined


radiation characteristics of conical and triangular antennas,” RCA Rev.,
vol. 13, pp. 425–452, Dec. 1952.
[8] J. G. Maloney and G. S. Smith, “Optimization of a conical antenna
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on wired I.T. Networks by randomly distributed phones—A compu-
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282–286, May 2006.
[11] R. A. Abd-Alhameed, D. Zhou, C. H. See, and P. S. Excell, “A wire-
grid adaptive meshing program for microstrip patch antenna designs
using a genetic algorithm,” IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 51, no.
1, pp. 147–151, Feb. 2009.
[12] D. Zhou, R. A. Abd-Alhameed, C. H. See, P. S. Excell, Y. F. Hu,
K. Khalil, and N. J. McEwan, “Quadrifilar helical antenna design for
satellite-mobile handsets using genetic algorithms,” Microw. Opt. Tech.
Lett, vol. 51, pp. 2668–2671, Nov. 2009.
[13] D. Zhou, R. A. Abd-Alhameed, C. H. See, M. S. Bin-Melha, Z. B.
Zainal-Abdin, and P. S. Excell, “New antenna designs for wideband
harmonic suppression using adaptive surface meshing and genetic al-
gorithms,” IET Microwaves, Antennas Propag., vol. 5, pp. 1054–1061,
2011.
[14] Arlon [Online]. Available: http://www.arlon-med.com/
[15] E. C. Fear, S. C. Hagness, P. M. Meaney, M. Okoniewski, and M. A.
Stuchly, “Enhancing breast tumor detection with near-field imaging,”
IEEE Microwave Mag., pp. 48–56, Mar. 2002.
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cancer detection—Experimental investigation of simple tumor
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of a scatterer at (a) 1.5 cm and (b) 3.0 cm. 3312–3319, Nov. 2005.
[17] M. A. Al-Joumayly, S. M. Aguilar, N. Behdad, and S. C. Hag-
ness, “Dual-band miniaturized patch antennas for microwave breast
imaging,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., pp. 268–271, 2010.
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gation of breast tumor imaging using indirect microwave holography,”
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was investigated in free space and within a tissue-equivalent medium. [19] M. Bialkowski and Y. Wang, “UWB cylindrical microwave imaging
A candidate structure was designed and verified, in terms of S param- system employing virtual array antenna concept for background effect
eters and near field patterns across the target frequency interval. Both removal,” Microw. Opt. Tech. Lett., pp. 1100–1104, 2011.
the simulated and measured results were in close agreement. Further- [20] Easy4 (DAEasy) SPEAG (Schmid & Partner Engineering AG),
more, a simple experiment was designed to verify the feasibility of the Zurich, Switzerland [Online]. Available: http://www.speag.com/prod-
ucts/easy4-mri/easy4 systems/easy4/
prototype antenna for scatterer detection in a lossy dielectric medium.
The initial findings demonstrate the potential suitability of the proto-
type, and the usefulness of the underlying approach.

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