IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

12, DECEMBER 2006 633

A New FDTD Formulation for Wave Propagation

in Biological Media With Cole–Cole Model
Bin Guo, Student Member, IEEE, Jian Li, Fellow, IEEE, and Henry Zmuda, Member, IEEE

Abstract—The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method
has been widely used to simulate the electromagnetic wave propa-
gation in biological tissues. The Cole–Cole model is a formulation
which can describe many types of biological tissues accurately
over a very wide frequency band. However, the implementation
of the Cole–Cole model using the FDTD method is difficult be-
cause of the fractional order differentiators in the model. In this
letter, a new FDTD formulation is presented for the modeling of
electromagnetic wave propagation in dispersive biological tissues
with the Cole–Cole model. The -transform is used to represent
the frequency dependent dielectric properties. The fractional
order differentiators in the Cole–Cole model is approximated by
a polynomial. The coefficients of the polynomial are found using a
least-squares fitting method.
Index Terms—Cole–Cole model, finite-difference time-domain
(FDTD) methods, least-squares (LS) fitting method, -transform.
logical tissues whose frequency dependent permittivity is given
by a Cole–Cole model [6]. The -transform [8] is used to repre-
sent the frequency dependent relationship between the electric
flux density and the electric field in domain, which leads to
a FDTD implementation directly. The fractional order differen-
tiators in the Cole–Cole model are approximated by a polyno-
mial. The coefficients of the polynomial are found by using a
least-squares (LS) fitting method.
II. FORMULATION
We consider the Cole–Cole media with the frequency depen-
dent relative permittivity given as
(1)

where is the order of the Cole–Cole model, is the high

I. INTRODUCTION frequency permittivity, is the relaxation time, is the pole
amplitude, 0 1 is a measure of the broadening
T HE finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method has
been widely used to simulate the electromagnetic wave
propagation in biological tissues. An advantage of using the
of dispersion, and is the conductivity. The frequency domain
relationship between electric flux density and electric field
FDTD method is that wide frequency band components of (2)
the electromagnetic field can be computed simultaneously.
The dielectric properties of biological tissues, however, are To avoid the several orders of magnitude difference between
dispersive and the variation with frequency is very complex the electric field and magnetic field, we normalized and [8]
[1]. To incorporate dispersion into the FDTD method, the
frequency dependent dielectric properties have often been (3)
described by Debye model [2]–[4] or single-pole conductivity
model [5]. However, the Debye model and the single-pole Then we have
conductivity model do not represent the frequency variation of (4)
many biological tissues accurately over a wide frequency band.
The Cole–Cole model [6] offers an alternative approach which (5)
can describe many types of biological tissues accurately over a
very wide frequency band. (6)
The implementation of Cole–Cole model in FDTD is difficult
because of the fractional order differentiators in the model [3], The update equation for and can be obtained from the
[7]. In [7], the authors transformed the Cole–Cole dispersion discrete formula of (4) and (6) as normally used [8]. To generate
relation into the time domain which involves a convolution in- a discrete difference formula for (5) the -transform is used to
tegral, and approximated the convolution integral by a decaying represent the relative permittivity in the frequency domain in
exponential series. The method is complex because it considers (5). By substituting the bilinear transform
the time domain convolution integral directly.
In this letter, a new FDTD formulation is presented for mod- (7)
eling of the electromagnetic wave propagation in dispersive bio-
into (5), we obtain
Manuscript received February 1, 2006; revised February 21, 2006. This
work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health under Grant
1R41CA107903-1, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China
under Grant 60428101.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, (8)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (e-mail: guobin@dsp.ufl.edu;
li@dsp.ufl.edu).
where is a time delay operator. By introducing parameters
Color versions of Figs. 1 and 2 are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.
org. (9)
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2006.885583

1531-1309/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE

634 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2006

TABLE I where and 0 1 are the coefficients of the

COLE–COLE PARAMETERS FOR FAT TISSUE AND MUSCLE TISSUE polynomials corresponding to 1 and 1 , respec-
tively. Because the time stable condition of the FDTD approach
guarantees that the time growth factor satisfies

(15)

the region of is 1,1 .

To find the coefficients in (14), define the LS error

(16)

The condition for to be a minimum is that

(17)

for 0 1, which gives

(18)

The more concise matrix form of (18) is

(19)
Fig. 1. Time-domain waveform of a differential Gaussian pulse computed
using our method and the Debye model when compared with the exact solution. where

and
.. .. .. ..
(10) . . . .

(8) can be rewritten as is a matrix and

are
(11) vectors. Here, denotes the transpose.
The solution to (19) is
The update equation of is given by expanding (10) as (20)

(12) which is the LS coefficients for (14).

Substituting (14) into (13) gives the relationship between
where and are one of the , , or components of and and as
at time step , respectively.
The key issue is how to obtain a recursive formula to dis-
cretize the fractional-order differentiator in (9). We rewrite (9)

(13)

and then use a th-order polynomial to approximate the frac-

tional-order differentiator as

(14)
(21)
GUO et al.: NEW FDTD FORMULATION FOR WAVE PROPAGATION
Fig. 2. Reflection coefficient magnitude at (a) air/fat interface and (b)
fat/muslce interface.
The update equation for is
(22)
where is one of the , , or components of at time step .
Then the update equation for can be obtained by substituting
(12) and (22) into (11).
III. NUMERICAL EXAMPLES
Two numerical examples are shown to verify the new formu-
lation presented. In the first example, a plane wave propagating
in fat tissue is simulated. The waveform of the plane wave is
a differential Gaussian pulse with time duration 100 ps. The
fourth-order 4 Cole–Cole models for fat tissue as well
as muscle tissue are listed in Table I [6]. A fifth-order polyno-
mial 5 is used to approximate the fractional-order dif-
ferentiator. The waveform was recorded after it has propagated
10 cm inside the fat tissue, and is shown in Fig. 1 with the solid
635
line. The exact solution, obtained using theoretical analytical
method, is also plotted in Fig. 1 and shown by dotted line. It can
be seen that the result presented here matches the exact solution
very well. As a comparison, a fifth-order Taylor series [9] is also
used to approximate the fractional-order differentiator in (14).
The Taylor result is much poorer because of its low convergence
speed. Plane wave propagation is also simulated in the fat tissue
with an approximated first-order Debye model [4] and plotted
in Fig. 1 with dashed line. The waveform simulated using the
present method agrees with the exact solution much better than
the result simulated using Debye model.
In the second example, the reflection coefficients at an air/fat
interface and a fat/muscle interface are computed, and shown
in Fig. 2(a) and (b), respectively. The incident wave used in the
simulation is a Gaussian pulse with time duration 25 ps. The
polynomial order is the same as for the first example. The solid
lines are simulated reflection coefficients using the new method,
which agree with the exact solutions (dotted lines) very well. As
a comparison, the simulation results using the Debye model for
fat and muscle tissues are also plotted in Fig. 2 with dashed lines.
The curves show that the new method presented herein greatly
improves the accuracy over the Debye model.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a new FDTD formulation is applied to the solu-
tion of electromagnetic wave propagation in biological tissues
using the Cole–Cole model. The fractional-order differentiator
in the Cole–Cole model is approximated by a polynomial whose
coefficients are found using a LS method. Numerical results
have been presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the new for-
mulation.
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