Microwave axial tomograph for medical applications: Preliminary set-up configuration

Imaging approaches based on the use of microwaves are acquiring an ever growing importance in several fields. Recently, applications of such approaches to medical imaging, e.g., for breast tumor identification, have also been proposed in the scientific literature. The present Authors are developing a microwave tomograph able to create images of a predefined investigation area by solving the inverse scattering problem which relates the measured electric field data to the dielectric properties of the investigated objects. In the present paper, a description of such system is reported and some advances needed to adapt it for medical imaging are devised by means of numerical simulation involving simplified models.