Signal Modeling with Random Scatterers for Confocal Microwave Imaging

Microwave breast tumor detection uses the electrical property contrast between normal tissues and malignancies to detect the latter in an early development stage. However, previous works on the microwave imaging uses 2-D or more complicated models of the breast and electromagnetic wave propagation. We present a computationally efficient and physically instructive electromagnetic wave channel modeling for confocal microwave imaging system for the breast tumor detection. The proposed model covers all of the factors that have been examined in the previous 2-D model, such as the radial spreading, path loss, partial reflection and transmission of the backscattered electromagnetic wave from the tumor cell. The characteristics of the reconstructed images of the tumor using the proposed 1-D model are compared with them of the previous 2-D FDTD method. Previous 2-D model of the cancerous breast utilizes the MRI-derived discretized cell model to simulate the realistic perturbation, but there has been no consideration on the system noise that can be detrimental to the reconstruction of the tumor. The effect of the system noise level to the reconstruction algorithm will be addressed as well