The EMERALD activities were devoted to accelerate translation of research on EM medical imaging into clinical prototypes by advancing the technology, standardizing procedures and developing prototypes for novel applications.
To develop standardized phantoms for laboratory assessment of EM medical imaging devices, several 3-D printed phantoms have been realized and several mixtures for mimicking biological tissues have been prepared and characterized, based on the accurate knowledge of the EM properties of human tissues. Moreover, fast measurements of dielectric properties with a small size microwave transceiver have been performed, where the traditional swept frequency vector network analyser was replaced with a more compact microwave transceiver. To develop new components and core elements for enhanced performance EM imaging systems, a novel calibration procedure has been implemented, and meta-material antennas and new matching media were realized and tested in order to improve the performance of the EM medical devices.
From the software point of view, a full-wave 3-D EM computational tool has been optimized to model EM medical imaging devices and scenarios, and different types of phantom and antenna models together with various re-meshing techniques have been implemented. Then, imaging algorithms for medical diagnosis devices as well as for clinical follow-up devices have been validated first using accurate numerical simulations, and then via data measured with the realized EM imaging prototypes. Specific hardware accelerators were designed for the imaging algorithms’ kernels under various constraints, such as power consumption and resource usage.
Finally, five EM prototypes were designed, numerically and experimentally validated via numerical and physical phantoms, respectively. The realized EM systems were developed for cerebrovascular diseases imaging, axillary lymph node diagnosis, chemotherapy monitoring, hyperthermia treatment monitoring, and imaged guided microwave ablation.
During the project, all the 13 Fellows were enrolled on local Ph.D. beneficiaries’ training program and co-supervised by experts from academia, industry as well as clinicians. Eight network-wide training events were organized: the core transferable skills week in Torino (Italy), three general workshops (one in Belgrade, Serbia, and the other two on-line), three summer schools (one in Napoli, Italy, and the other two on-line) and the final conference in Paris (France) where the EMERALD main results were illustrated by the ESRs and supervisors to the scientific community and the industrial stakeholders.
Finally, all the Fellows were the primary contributors to several journal papers and presentations at international scientific conferences, and a digital open-access repository of human tissues’ dielectric properties was realized and made available on-line.
