Microwave imaging of a realistic cancerous phantom using an ultra-wideband antenna transceiver system

In this paper, an Ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna based microwave imaging transceiver system for cancer detection is presented. The focus is on design, fabrication, testing and de-noising of this system. Initially, the transceiver system, which consists of two UWB Vivaldi antennas, is designed and fabricated, and scattering parameters measured using a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to show its suitability for subsequent experiments. Secondly, a skin-tumour-fat phantom is fabricated using a gelatin-oil mixture technology. This phantom is then imaged using the transceiver system, to detect embedded tumours. Finally, an image de-noising algorithm is used to de-blur the resulting image. Experimental results show an acceptable level of performance for the proposed transceiver system in cancer detection.