Prestigious award to a young IREA researcher

MNP CS

During the XX Italian Meeting on Electromagnetics held in Padova from September 15 to 18, dr. Rosa Scapaticci, research fellow at IREA, together with Martina Bevacqua Ph.D. student at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, was honored with the Barzilai Prize, a prestigious award assigned by SIEm (Italian Society of Electromagnetics) to the best work proposed at the Meeting by authors under the age of 35 years.

The award was assigned to the work 'Exploiting compressive sensing in Magnetic Nano Particle enhanced MWI for breast cancer imaging' in which the young scholars have proposed a processing methodology able to improve the performance of a new technique for microwave diagnostics of breast cancer, developed at the IREA within the project MERIT.

This diagnostic technique uses electromagnetic fields at microwave frequencies, as a non-invasive and non-harmful survey instrument, jointly with magnetic nanoparticles as contrast agent. These latter, "functionalized" through appropriate biochemical procedures, are indeed able to concentrate only in tumor tissues and to induce a selective variation of the magnetic properties. Given the non magnetic nature of human tissues, this "marking" allows to obtain a highly reliable diagnostic technique.

The methodology proposed by the authors, who analyzed its potentiality through a broad campaign of numerical simulations and found improved performances compared to the standard techniques used so far, can provide significant advantages such as the ability to identify small lesions, a crucial factor in the early diagnosis, or to appreciate the morphology of the lesion, useful information for clinicians in order to identify its typology.

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