Abstract
Globally, breast cancer is a major reason for female mortality. Due to the limitations of current clinical imaging, the researchers are encouraged to explore alternative and complementary tools to available techniques to detect the breast tumor in an earlier stage. This article outlines a new, portable, and low-cost microwave imaging (MWI) system using an iterative enhancing technique for breast imaging. A compact side slotted tapered slot antenna is designed for microwave imaging. The radiating fins of tapered slot antenna are modified by etching nine rectangular side slots. The irregular slots on the radiating fins enhance the electrical length as well as produce strong directive radiation due to the suppression of induced surface currents that radiate vertically at the outer edges of the radiating arms with end-fire direction. It has remarkable effects on efficiency and gain. With the addition of slots, the side-lobe levels are reduced, the gain of the main-lobe is increased and corrects the squint effects simultaneously, thus improving the characteristics of the radiation. For experimental validation, a heterogeneous breast phantom was developed that contains dielectric properties identical to real breast tissues with the inclusion of tumors. An alternative PC controlled and microcontroller-based mechanical MWI system is designed and developed to collect the antenna scattering signal. The radiated backscattered signals from the targeted area of the human body are analyzed to reveal the changes in dielectric properties in tissues. The dielectric constants of tumorous cells are higher than that of normal tissues due to their higher water content. The remarkable deviation of the scattered field is processed by using newly proposed Iteratively Corrected Delay and Sum (IC-DAS) algorithm and the reconstruction of the image of the phantom interior is done. The developed UWB (Ultra-Wideband) antenna based MWI has been able to perform the detection of tumorous cells in breast phantom that can pave the way to saving lives.
Highlights
In literature[5], a study is carried out with 258 patients, where 177 had benign tumors and 177 having malignant tumors
This work is dedicated to the design, development, and implementation of a new, complete, portable, and UWB antenna based microwave imaging system that can be applied for breast tumor detection in real-time
A Side slotted UWB directional Vivaldi antenna is proposed where the antennas fulfill the requirements of microwave imaging because of their high directive nature with a high gain due to the tapered slot design and having a high peak value for the pulse envelope
Summary
The microwave imaging technology is based on the different dielectric properties of the tumor and the surrounding healthy tissues. The parameters of VNA are set as the IF-bandwidth is 10 Hz, the output power is 10 dBm, and the frequency range is 3.10 to 7.60 GHz. The microwave pulse is transmitted to the phantom from the transmitting antenna, simultaneously the reflected backscattered signals are collected by the receiving antennas. One of the preferred methods is rotation subtraction that relies on the contrast between the original signal and at least a single illumination of rotation[45] In such systems, the offset data is collected using an array of antenna surrounding the scanning area. Reflection caused due to the tumor increases the return loss resulting in the higher reflected power from the antennas to phantom Several metrics such as the accuracy, the localization error, the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR), and the signal-to-mean ratio (SMR) of the reconstructed image are considered for evaluation criteria of an imaginmg detection system. The proposed system exhibits better performance for breast phantom, which is promising for early-stage tumor detection
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