Magnetic nanoparticles enhanced breast cancer microwave imaging via compressive sensing

Magnetic nanoparticles have been recently proposed as contrast agent in microwave breast cancer imaging. As a matter of fact, being human tissues non-magnetic, their use would allow achieving a reliable and specific diagnosis of breast cancer, by pursuing the reconstruction of a magnetic contrast into a totally electric scenario. In this communication, we investigate the adoption of compressive sensing as imaging strategy, which has been recently considered to solve linear problems in which the unknown is sparse. In this respect, the low amount of nanoparticles actually targetable assures that the problem to be faced in microwave imaging enhanced by the use of magnetic nanoparticles is linear. In addition, being the magnetic contrast associated to the targeted tumour, which is small and localized, the sought unknown function is also intrinsically sparse.