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Terahertz (THz) technology, particularly THz plasmonics for sensing applications, has gathered substantial interest across various research domains. Metamaterials (MM), artificially designed structures operating at subwavelength scales, offer a solution to enhance the sensitivity of free-space THz detection. Lung cancer, a pervasive and life-threatening disease globally, contributes significantly to cancer-related mortality due to challenges in early diagnosis and the burden of expensive detection methods. Brain cancer, with its considerable heterogeneity and high fatality rates, primarily afflicts children and adolescents. In response to these critical issues, we propose an innovative, cost-effective, and label-free strategy for the rapid discrimination of lung and brain cancer cells, employing THz metamaterial absorbers. This research employs a polarization-insensitive THz narrowband metamaterial absorber (MMA) operating at 4.3 THz, featuring quartz as a substrate and gold as a ring resonator. Simulation outcomes demonstrate that the absorption spectrum peak shifts when the sensor interacts with analytes of varying refractive indices and thicknesses. Covering the sensor with 0.16 μm thick non-destructive analytes yields an impressive sensitivity of up to 68 GHz/RIU. We conducted numerical simulations, exploring variations in analyte thickness, quantity, and refractive index. The results confirm that sensitivity intensifies around the edges of the ring resonator and analyte concentration near it, underscoring the significant influence of field enhancement in the surrounding region. This innovative detection approach promises substantial cost reductions through reusability, offering great potential in the field of cancer detection, enabling differentiation between cancer types, and identifying primary lesions and metastatic cancers.
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