Design of a portable nanosensor for easy breast tomography

Abstract

In this study, a portable nanosensor for the early and easy detection of carcinoma tumors was designed and simulated. The nanosensor consists of deposited nanoparticles, which have a regular distance from each other. It has high sensitivity to the alteration of electromagnetic fields, which are scattered from different tissues (normal and tumor). Normal tissue permittivity differs from the permittivity of tumors; hence, their interaction with electromagnetic waves will lead to different results in the case of an electrical field and its gradient profile. It means that non-uniformity will occur and this is a meaningful signal for detection. Nevertheless, it is obvious that due to the tissue absorption coefficient, scattered photons will be very negligible and a small fraction of the photons will reach the detector. Hence, in this paper, a sensor based on nanoparticles is proposed, which has enough sensitivity to pick up scattered photons, amplify, and detect them. It should be noted that the roles of the nanosensor between the body surface and detector are signal amplification and sampling via the nanoparticle plasmonic effect. This means that the designed nanoparticles sample the scattered waves and amplify them in the near-field. Finally, our design and simulation results show that the digitized signals could be easily and clearly detected by force or temperature detectors. Thus, easy breast tomography will be carried out with no need for clinics and their equipment.