Fundamental issues in antenna design for microwave medical imaging applications

This paper surveys the development of microwave medical imaging and the fundamental challenges associated with microwave antennas design for medical imaging applications. Different microwave antennas used in medical imaging applications such as monopoles, bow-tie, vivaldi and pyramidal horn antennas are discussed. The challenges faced when the latter used in medical imaging environment are detailed. The paper provides the possible solutions for the challenges at hand and also provides insight into the modelling work which will help the microwave engineering community to understand the behaviour of the microwave antennas in coupling media

A Robust and Artifact Resistant Algorithm of Ultrawideband Imaging System for Breast Cancer Detection.

Goal: Ultrawideband radar imaging is regarded as one of the most promising alternatives for breast cancer detection. A range of algorithms reported in literature show satisfactory tumor detection capabilities. However, most of algorithms suffer significant deterioration or even fail when the early-stage artifact, including incident signals and skin-fat interface reflections, cannot be perfectly removed from received signals. Furthermore, fibro-glandular tissue poses another challenge for tumor detection, due to the small dielectric contrast between glandular and cancerous tissues. Methods: This paper introduces a novel Robust and Artifact Resistant (RAR) algorithm, in which a neighborhood pairwise correlation-based weighting is designed to overcome the adverse effects from both artifact and glandular tissues. In RAR, backscattered signals are time-shifted, summed, and weighted by the maximum combination of the neighboring pairwise correlation coefficients between shifted signals, forming the intensity of each point within an imaging area. Results: The effectiveness was investigated using 3-D anatomically and dielectrically accurate finite-difference-time-domain numerical breast models. The use of neighborhood pairwise correlation provided robustness against artifact, and enabled the detection of multiple scatterers. RAR is compared with four well-known algorithms: delay-and-sum, delay-multiply-and-sum, modified-weighted-delay-and-sum, and filtered-delay-and-sum. Conclusion: It has shown that RAR exhibits improved identification capability, robust artifact resistance, and high detectability over its counterparts in most scenarios considered, while maintaining computational efficiency. Simulated tumors in both homogeneous and heterogonous, from mildly to moderately dense breast phantoms, combining an entropy-based artifact removal algorithm, were successfully identified and localized. Significance: These results show the strong potential of RAR for breast cancer screening

Evaluation of limestone layer’s effect for uwb microwave imaging of breast models using neural network

X-ray mammography is widely used for detection of breast cancer. Besides its popularity, this method did not have the potential of discriminating a tumor covered with limestone from a pure limestone mass. This might cause misdetection of some tumors covered with limestone or unnecessary surgery for a pure limestone mass. In this study, Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) signals are used for the imaging. A feed-forward artificial neural network (FF-ANN) is used to classify the mass in the breast whether it is a tumor or not by using the transmission coefficients obtained from UWB signals. A spherical tumor covered with limestone and pure limestone masses were designed and placed into the fibro-glandular layer of breast model using CST Microwave Studio Software. The radius of the masses for both cases is changed from 1 mm to 10 mm with 1 mm steps. Horn antennas were chosen to send and receive Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) signals between 2 and 18 GHz frequency range. The obtained results show that the proposed method, on the contrary of the mammogram, has the potential of discriminating the tumor covered with limestone from the pure limestone, for the mass sizes of 7, 8 and 10 mm. Consequently, the UWB microwave imaging can be used to distinguish these cases from each other