Application of FDTD and RGFM to EM interaction with biological tissue: a comparison

The behavior of electromagnetic fields within biological tissue is a topic which has received considerable attention. The finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique is used to model such electromagnetic tissue interactions due to its flexibility and efficiency. A new technique has been introduced previously, known as the recursive Green´s function method (RGFM), it efficiently models fields in inhomogeneous media. To date, there have been no studies of the application of this method to the case of high-permittivity materials. This paper explores the application of the RGFM to the modeling of two-dimensional biological tissue and presents a comparison of the RGFM and FDTD approaches for such simulations. A summary of each technique highlights their similarities and differences. Several examples are used to compare the two methods in terms of the computational accuracy as well as computational resource requirements.