The low-power transmission levels of ultra wideband (UWB) technology alongside its advantageously large bandwidth makes it a prime candidate to address problems in various areas including short range high data rate communications and radar applications. In addition to these application schemes, other fields where UWB technology would be deemed appropriate are under investigation. Particularly, interest has grown in the utilization of UWB radar in medicine and healthcare applications. Wearable health-monitoring systems are becoming very popular, especially for permitting non-invasive diagnosis. Moreover, recent advances in UWB hardware technology have enabled the possibility of achieving the large bandwidth, which is required for higher resolution imaging and detection. Several unique properties of UWB, including its non-ionizing signals, low cost and the ability to penetrate through media (air, skin, bones and tissues) have transformed it into an ideal candidate to be used as a novel medical imaging technology.
UWB imaging has attracted growing attention, especially for its applicability to breast cancer detection, motivated by the significant contrast in the dielectric properties at microwave frequencies of normal and malignant tissues. Current research in UWB breast imaging can be divided mainly into microwave tomography and microwave radar techniques. Several microwave breast apparatus have been constructed; some of them are now in the clinical validation process. Recently, microwave image has also been applied for imaging of human forearms, skin cancer detection, and bone imaging. To the best of our knowledge, an UWB apparatus for the purpose of bone fracture assessment does not exist.
Extension of UWB imaging to bone fracture assessment is one goal of WEBOING. This, on an engineering side, pave the way for the construction of an apparatus, which has been designed to be portable. More in detail, a virtual array will measure the scattered signal outside the portion of the body under investigation; next, the electromagnetic field behaviour inside such body portion will be reconstructed using Huygens Principle (HP), and from such behaviour, the imaging of the bone fracture will be performed. UWB signals allow all the information in the frequency domain to be utilized by combining the information from the individual frequencies to construct a consistent image. After having performed fracture imaging, UWB signals will serve the purpose of monitoring a bone lesion by considering reflection/transmission coefficients.
