Estimation of regional geometric and spatially averaged dielectric properties of an object

A new inversion strategy is presented that integrates a radar-based method with microwave tomography (MT) to efficiently provide low resolution information about an object´s structure and average properties. The inversion technique is carried out in two steps. First, locations and spatial features of regions of interest are estimated directly from ultrawideband (UWB) reflection data and used to create reconstruction models. These models are incorporated into the next step which estimates mean dielectric properties over each region with MT. A practical application is explored using a 2D breast model formed from the magnetic resonance (MR) scan of a patient. The algorithm´s ability to infer the breast´s basic internal structure is demonstrated with this example.