Microwave interaction with biological tissues

The study of the interaction between electromagnetic waves and living tissues is of interest to several applications of societal relevance such as the assessment of potential adverse effects of electromagnetic fields or the utilization of electromagnetic waves for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes. Numerical modeling of electromagnetic wave propagation in interaction with biological tissues at microwave frequencies requires to solve the system of Maxwell equations coupled to appropriate models of physical dispersion in the tissues, such the Debye and Cole-Cole models. Since the creation of the team, our works on this topic have mainly been focussed on the study of the exposure of humans to radiations from wireless communication systems. In the recent years, we have studied various DGTD methods for the numerical dosimetry analysis of the exposure of humans to electromagnetic waves.

Numerical simulation of the exposure of head tissues to an electromagnetic wave emitted by a mobile phone, using a DGTD method. This calculation involved an heterogeneous geometrical model of 4 head tissues (skin, skull, cerebro spinal fluid and brain) consisting of an unstructured tetrahedral mesh with 7,894,172 tetrahedra (the total number of degrees of freedom for this problem is 189,460,128). The simulation was run on 512 cores of a Bull Novascale 3045 parallel system consisting of Intel Itanium 2/1.6 GHz nodes interconnected by a high performance Infiniband network. This work was granted access to the HPC resources of CCRT under the allocation 2009-t2009065004 made by GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif).

Numerical simulation of the exposure of a pregnant women to electromagnetic waves emitted by multiple localized sources, using DGTD-P1 and DGTD-P2 methods. This calculation involved an heterogeneous geometrical model of 3 tissues (body of the women, body of the foetus and brain of the foetus) consisting of an unstructured tetrahedral mesh with 5,536,852 tetrahedra (the total number of degrees of freedom for this problem is 132,884,448 for the DGTD-P₁ method and 332,211,120 for the DGTD-P₂ method). he underlying DGTD method has been ported to a multiple GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) BULL Novascale R422 computing system. The single precision floating point performance of the DGTD-P₁ and DGTD-P₂ calculation is 4.7 Tflops and 8.9 Tflops on 128 GPUs. This work was granted access to the HPC resources of CCRT under the allocation 2010-t2010065004 made by GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif).

Related publications

H. Fahs, A. Hadjem, S. Lanteri, J. Wiart and M.F. Wong
Calculation of the SAR induced in head tissues using a high order DGTD method and triangulated geometrical models
IEEE Trans. Ant. Propag., Vol. 59, No. 12, pp. 4669-4678 (2011)

C. Scheid and S. Lanteri
Convergence of a Discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the mixed time domain Maxwell's equations in dispersive media
IMA J. Numer. Anal., Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 432-459 (2013)
Preprint available as INRIA RR-7634 on Hyper Article Online

C. Durochat, S. Lanteri and R. Léger
A non-conforming multi-element DGTD method for the simulation of human exposure to electromagnetic waves
Int. J. Numer. Model., Electron. Netw. Devices Fields, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp 614-625 (2014)