Beamspace based time reversal processing for breast cancer detection

Abstract

Here we propose novel beamspace processing techniques to enhance the existing time reversal imaging techniques and demonstrate their capability for the detection of early stage breast cancer. Performance of the proposed imaging technique for the detection of malignant lesions has been investigated using the FDTD breast model that contains dense breast tissues that have differing composition of fibroglandular tissues. The detection performance of the proposed method is also investigated when contrast in the dielectric properties between malignant, benign and dense fibroglandular breast tissues is very low. It is found that the proposed beamspace processing enhances the capability of time reversal MUSIC (TR MUSIC) and DORT (decomposition of the time reversal operator) algorithms in successfully detecting and localising the malignant lesions even in highly dense breast models.