High contrast microwave tomography using topology optimization techniques

Microwave tomography for medical applications leads to a difficult reconstruction problem for the dielectric properties of biological tissue due to strongly diffracting waves in combination with large dielectric contrasts. We apply the material distribution technique used for topology optimization of elastic structures in order to solve the nonlinear least-squares problem underlying the reconstruction problem. Using simulated numerical data with an approximate signal-to-noise ratio of 40 dB and geometrical a priori information on the unknown objects, we obtain good estimates of the dielectric properties corresponding to biological objects.