Polarimetry Effect in Three-dimensional Contrast Source Inversion for Microwave Breast imaging

Abstract

This paper presents a polarimetric effect for the three-dimensional microwave quantitative imaging using contrast source inversion (CSI). Microwave breast cancer detection have a number of advantages over X-ray screening, in terms of safety, non-harmful exposure, or painless measurement. To discriminate a cancer tissues from dense fibro-glandular tissues, a quantitative complex dielectric profile should be given, and there are many inverse scattering approaches to address with the above issues. The CSI is one of the most promising algorithm, which does not require an iterative use of forward solver, which leads to a much lower computational complexity. However, there are few studies for full 3-D demonstrations of CSI focusing on biomedical application, where a highly heterogeneous media should be treated. Especially for heterogeneous media, a cross polarization effect is not negligible, which has not been considered in most of literature. This paper focuses on the effect of cross-polarization component for CSI based inversion. The 3-D finite difference time domain (FDTD) numerical simulation, using realistic breast phantom, demonstrate a necessity for fully polarimetric inversion.