Microwave Radar Imaging of Heterogeneous Breast Tissue Integrating A Priori Information

الملخص EN

Conventional radar-based image reconstruction techniques fail when they are applied toheterogeneous breast tissue, since the underlying in-breast relative permittivity is unknown or assumedto be constant.

This results in a systematic error during the process of image formation.

A recenttrend in microwave biomedical imaging is to extract the relative permittivity from the object undertest to improve the image reconstruction quality and thereby to enhance the diagnostic assessment.

In this paper, we present a novel radar-based methodology for microwave breast cancer detection inheterogeneous breast tissue integrating a 3D map of relative permittivity as a priori information.

Thisleads to a novel image reconstruction formulation where the delay-and-sum focusing takes place intime rather than range domain.

Results are shown for a heterogeneous dense (class-4) and a scatteredfibroglandular (class-2) numerical breast phantom using Bristol’s 31-element array configuration.