Chapter Abstract-Terahertz (THz) application in food contamination detection

 Aifeng Ren,  Adnan Zahid, Xiaodong Yang, Akram Alomainy,  Muhammad Ali Imran, Qammer H. Abbasi

https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/books/10.1049/sbew542e_ch5

This chapter mainly focuses on various sensing technologies that have been employed to detect food and water contamination. It has been found that these conventional sensing technologies appear to be unfeasible and impractical to meet with the challenging growth of population. In this aspect, THz sensing is discussed in detail and deemed to be more effective due to its strong penetration feature, high resolution, and sensitivity to monitor the molecular changes in fruits. This chapter also introduces a novel technique of fruits contamination detection by monitoring MC and observe the transmission and path loss response of fruits. It also investigates an important parameter such as the absorption coefficient and shows some significant results and correlation of MC with transmission response and absorption coefficient. Upon close analysis, these results give meaningful information about the composites present in fruits such as carbohydrates and proteins. Toward the end, this chapter emphasizes on the advancement and development of terahertz technology applications and found that the THz sensing is a promising candidate and has a potential to change a paradigm in the plant science sector.

Abstract-State-of-the-Art in Terahertz Sensing for Food and Water Security – A Comprehensive Review

Aifeng Ren, Adnan Zahid, Dou Fan, Xiaodong Yang, Muhammad AliImran, Akram Alomainy, Qammer H.Abbasi, 


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224418308768

Background

Recently, there has been a dramatic change in the field of terahertz (THz) technology. The recent advancements in the THz radiation sector considering generation, manipulation and detection have brought revolution in this field, which enable the integration of THz sensing systems into real-world. The THz technology presents detection techniques and various issues, while providing significant opportunities for sensing food and water contamination detection.

Scope and Approach

Many researchers around the world have exploited the potential of invaluable new applications of THz sensing ranging from surveillance, healthcare and recently for food and water contamination detection. The microbial pollution in water and food is one the crucial issues with regard to the sanitary state for drinking water and daily consumption of food. To address this risk, the detection of microbial contamination is of utmost importance, since the consumption of insanitary or unhygienic food can lead to catastrophic illness.

Key Findings and Conclusions

This paper presents a first-time review of the open literature covering the advances in the THz sensing for microbiological contamination of food and water, in addition to state-of-the-art in network architectures, applications and recent industrial developments. With unique superiority, the THz non-destructive detection technology in food inspection and water contamination detection is emerging as a new area of study. With the great progress, some important challenges and future research directions are presented within the field.

Abstract-Multiple antenna techniques for terahertz nano-bio communication

Aya Abdelaziz,  Ke Yang,  Khalid Qaraqe,  Joseph Boutros,  Qammer H. Abbasi,  Akram Alomainy

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8402408/

Using higher frequency bands becomes an essential demand resulting from the explosive wireless traffic needs and the spectrum shortage of the currently used bands. This paper presents an overview on the terahertz technology and its application in the area of multi-input multi-output antenna system and in-vivo nano-communication. In addition, it presents a preliminary study on applying multiple input-single output (MISO) antenna technique to investigate the signal propagation and antenna diversity techniques inside the human skin tissues, which is represented by three layers: stratum corneum (SC), epidermis, and dermis layers, in the terahertz (THz) frequency range (0.8–1.2) THz. The spatial antenna diversity is investigated in this study to understand MISO system performance for two different in-vivo channels resulting from the signal propagation between two transmitting antennas, located at the dermis layer, and one receiving antenna, located at epidermis layer. Three techniques are investigated: selection combining (SC), equal-gain combing (EGC), and maximum-ratio combining (MRC). The initial study indicates that using multiple antenna technique with THz might be not useful for in-vivo nano-communication.

Abstract-Impact of Cell Density and Collagen Concentration on the Electromagnetic Properties of Dermal Equivalents in the Terahertz Band

 Rui Zhang,  Ke Yang,  Qammer H. Abbasi, Najah Abed AbuAli, Akram Alomainy,

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8353436/

In this paper, the measurement of collagen gels and dermal equivalents (DEs) with three kinds of fibroblast cell densities and collagen concentrations is performed, respectively, using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) in transmission mode. With the objective to reduce the thickness uncertainty, an algorithm to extract material parameters and sample thickness of thin samples simultaneously is employed. The statistical mean and standard deviation of the refractive indexes and absorption coefficients in a THz band from 0.2 to 1.5 THz are presented. It is shown that the refractive indexes of DEs drop by around 10%, whereas the absorption coefficients decrease by 20% when cell density increases by one order from 0.1 to 1 M/mL. In addition, the complex refractive indexes of DEs with 3-mg/mL collagen are higher than those with 2 mg/mL, whereas the THz optical parameters of DEs with 2.5 mg/mL are the lowest. The obtained results indicate that the difference in the intrinsic biological features, initial cell density, and collagen concentration changes the tissue hydration, which in turn brings changes to the electromagnetic properties.

Abstract-Collagen Analysis at Terahertz Band using Double-Debye Parameter Extraction and Particle Swarm Optimisation

Ke Yang, Nishtha Chopra,  Qammer Abbasi,  Khalid Qaraqe,  Akram Alomainy

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7872380/

The paper focuses on the analysis of cultivated collagen samples at the terahertz (THz) band using double debye model parameter extraction. Based on measured electrical and optical parameters, we propose a model to describe such parameters extracted with a global optimisation method; namely, Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO). Comparing the measured data with ones in the open literature, it is evident that using only cultivated collagen is not sufficient to represent the performance of the epidermis layer of the skin tissue at the THz band of interest. The results show that the differences between the measured data and published ones are as high as 14 and 6 for the real and imaginary values of the dielectric constant, respectively. Our proposed double debye model agrees well with the measured data.

Abstract-Analytical Characterisation of the Terahertz In-Vivo Nano-Network in the Presence of Interference Based on TS-OOK Communication Scheme

 Rui Zhang,  Ke Yang,  Qammer H. Abbasi,  Khalid A. Qaraqe, Akram Alomainy

This figure shows the average SINR versus communication distance for different node densities in human blood (red), skin (blue) and fat (green) tissues . High node density potentially impairs the system performance and SINR drops about 10 dB when the node density rises one order. The effective communication distance for dense in-vivo nano-networks is restrained to about 1 mm


http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7945235/

The envisioned dense nano-network inside the human body at terahertz (THz) frequency suffers a communication performance degradation among nano-devices. The reason for this performance limitation is not only the path loss and molecular absorption noise, but also the presence of multi-user interference and the interference caused by utilising any communication scheme, such as time spread ON—OFF keying (TS-OOK). In this paper, an interference model utilising TS-OOK as a communication scheme of the THz communication channel inside the human body has been developed and the probability distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for THz communication within different human tissues, such as blood, skin, and fat, has been analyzed and presented. In addition, this paper evaluates the performance degradation by investigating the mean values of SINR under different node densities in the area and the probabilities of transmitting pulses. It results in the conclusion that the interference restrains the achievable communication distance to approximate 1 mm, and more specific range depends on the particular transmission circumstance. Results presented in this paper also show that by controlling the pulse transmission probability and node density, the system performance can be ameliorated. In particular, SINR of in vivo THz communication between the deterministic targeted transmitter and the receiver with random interfering nodes in the medium improves about 10 dB, when the node density decreases one order. The SINR increases approximate 5 and 2 dB, when the pulse transmitting probability drops from 0.5 to 0.1 and 0.9 to 0.5.

Abstract-Cooperative In-Vivo Nano-Network Communication at Terahertz Frequencies

Qammer H. Abbasi, Ali Arshad Nasir, Ke Yang, Khalid Qaraqe, Akram Alomainy

(Submitted on 22 Mar 2017)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07765

Nano devices have great potential to play a vital role in future medical diagnostics and treatment technologies because of its non-invasive nature and ability to reach delicate body sites easily as compared to conventional devices. In this paper, a novel concept of cooperative communication for in-vivo nano-network is presented to enhance the communication among these devices. The effect on the system outage probability performance is conducted for various parameters including relay lacement, number of relays, transmit power, bandwidth and carrier frequency. Results show approximately a 10-fold increase in the system outage performance whenever an additional relay is included in the cooperative network, hence show a great potential of using cooperative communication to enhance the performance of nano-network at terahertz frequencies.