Multifrequency Microwave-Induced Thermal Acoustic Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Microwave-induced thermal acoustic imaging (TAI) is a promising early breast cancer detection technique, which combines the advantages of microwave stimulation and ultrasound imaging and offers a high imaging contrast, as well as high spatial resolution at the same time. A new multifrequency microwave-induced thermal acoustic imaging scheme for early breast cancer detection is proposed in this paper. Significantly more information about the human breast can be gathered using multiple frequency microwave stimulation. A multifrequency adaptive and robust technique (MART) is presented for image formation. Due to its data-adaptive nature, MART can achieve better resolution and better interference rejection capability than its data-independent counterparts, such as the delay-and-sum method. The effectiveness of this procedure is shown by several numerical examples based on 2-D breast models. The finite-difference time-domain method is used to simulate the electromagnetic field distribution, the absorbed microwave energy density, and the thermal acoustic field in the breast model.