Biomedical Applications of Terahertz Technology

Terahertz radiation has been used for detection, sensing and imaging of biological objects and for medical imaging and diagnostics. The THz absorption or reflection from biological tissues yields their detailed spectroscopic signatures. Cancer cells have a significantly higher water content than the healthy cells, and a higher sensitivity of the THz absorption and reflection to the water content enables the application of the THz absorption and/or reflection for cancer diagnostics. Recently developed highly sensitive plasmonic TeraFET detectors and TeraFET arrays implemented using mainstream Si CMOS technology detect could detect minute quantities of biological samples and could scan large areas of biological tissues with a high sensitivity and nanometer scale resolution. Future developments of this technology will allow for a much more accurate cancer detection based on the scans yielding information about both magnitude and phase of the THz signal.