Classification of skin phenotypes caused by diabetes mellitus using complex scattering parameters in the millimeter-wave frequency range

Abstract

The pathological skin phenotype caused by hyperglycemia is an important indicator for the progress of diabetes mellitus. An early detection of diabetes assures an early intervention to regulate the carbohydrate metabolism. In this publication a non-invasive detection principle based on the measurement of complex scattering parameters in the millimeter-wave frequency range is presented. The measurement principle provides evidence of the applicability for the identification of different glycemic states in animal models. The method proposed here can be used to predict diabetes status in animal models and is interesting for application on humans in view of safeness of millimeter-wave radiation. Furthermore the complex scattering parameters give important information about the anatomic varieties between the analyzed skin samples of the different mice strains. In contrast to other methods, our approach is less sensitive to skin variations between animals.

On the Development of a Simulation Strategy to Model the Behavior of Graphene-Based Devices in Electromagnetic Simulators

“…Finally, the slope of the P out vs. P in characteristic is slightly lower than the theoretical value 7. This could be due to a saturation effect related to the low field condition expressed in (3), which establishes that the input power should be considerably lower than 1 W (≡ 30 dBm).…”

Early, Non-Invasive Sensing of Sustained Hyperglycemia in Mice Using Millimeter-Wave Spectroscopy

“…Besides this treatment, no special procedures were installed for the measurements. It has been proven earlier that the sensing approach was insensitive to the skin properties of the animals such as hairs [22,28]. Excessive movement of the mice was prevented using anesthesia during the measurement time (around 45 s).…”

“…We have used the amplitude of the transmission coefficient only because the transmitted wave was less sensitive to the outer skin layers and propagated through all the biological tissue. We have proven earlier [28] that the amplitude and phase were important if one did not employ statistical techniques. The major advantage of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique employed here was that the sensing involves only amplitude data.…”

“…In our previous work, the hyperglycemia condition was clearly discriminated from normoglycemia and two different types of hyperglycemia were detected: Hyperglycemia caused by overfed animals (obese mice) and hyperglycemia due to diabetes condition (diabetic mice). In addition, it was proven that such discrimination using millimeter-wave spectroscopy sensing was not influenced by the instantaneous glucose level, skin thickness, or skin phenotypes [22,28]. The results indicate that the proposed method is a very powerful tool for sustained hyperglycemia and diabetes detection being both non-invasive and highly independent of environmental conditions.…”

“…In particular, the millimeter-wave frequency range exhibits great potential for the non-invasive blood glucose level monitoring [23,24,25,26] and non-invasive, in-vivo blood glucose monitoring in animal models, which has been demonstrated at frequencies below 40 GHz [27]. When considering penetration through the skin, even higher frequencies can be considered, as verified by the authors [22,28]. The advantage of using higher frequencies is that the interaction region is well defined, the probing location is smaller due to tighter focusing capabilities or smaller waveguide dimensions, dispersion effects are less pronounced, and compactness of the sensing equipment is improved.…”