Abstract
Microwave imaging for breast cancer detection has been of significant interest for the last two decades. Recent studies focus on solving the imaging problem using an inverse scattering approach. Efforts have mainly been focused on the development of the inverse scattering algorithms, experimental setup, antenna design and clinical trials. However, the success of microwave breast imaging also heavily relies on the quality of the forward data such that the tumor inside the breast volume is well illuminated. In this work, a numerical study of the forward scattering data is conducted. The scattering behavior of simple breast models under different polarization states and aspect angles of illumination are considered. Numerical results have demonstrated that better data contrast could be obtained when the breast volume is illuminated using cross-polarized components in linear polarization basis or the copolarized components in the circular polarization basis.
Highlights
Studies [3,4,5] reported that there is a significant contrast between malignant tumor and healthy breast tissue which forms a strong foundation for the use of microwave-based techniques for breast cancer detection, recent studies [26, 27] found that the contrast is much lower
Throughout the years, numerous studies have been conducted from different research groups [6,7,8,9,10,11,12] and variations of the original radarbased technique, such as microwave imaging via space-time (MIST) beamforming [6, 7], tissue sensing adaptive radar (TSAR) [8, 9] have been proposed
To achieve good contrast of the amplitude and phase responses of the forward data between the cases with and without tumor, the excitation frequency should be at least 1 GHz as the lower-frequency components correspond mainly to the scattering from the entire breast volume
Summary
In the last two decades, extensive studies have been contributed to breast cancer detection using microwave-based technologies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. The number of unknown variables depends mainly on the physical size, the dielectric properties and geometry of the object, the required spatial resolution, and the frequency of interest (which is a factor that determines the spatial discretization in the computation domain) Optimization of such a high-dimensional problem with thousands unknown variables is not trivial and chances for trapping into local minima could be high. The forward scattering data of the two cases, that is, breast volume with and without tumor, under different polarization basis throughout the entire frequency bandwidth is investigated. Under this setup with solely breast volumes without any antenna array surrounding it, the scattered field is purely dependent to the breast volume This allows us to get further understanding about the scattering data in microwave breast imaging problem under different polarization basis at different frequencies. Discussions and conclusions will be reached towards the end of the paper
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