Detection of malignant breast tissues using microwave imaging

In this paper, a novel microwave image reconstruction method is proposed for 3-dimensional confocal microwave imaging (CMI) technique for breast cancer detection. It improves the traditional delay-and-sum (DAS) method leading to reduction of clutter response from the reconstructed image. For CMI method, the location information of significant scatterers such as malignant tissues is hidden in the backscattered response. However, there are problems on the estimation of the backscattered response due to the dispersive nature of the breast tissue. Hence the reconstruction with standard DAS method will result in poor resolution. Here, we propose a new technique called ¿modified-weighted-delay-and-sum (MWDAS)¿ method to improve the localization performance over the standard DAS method. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed MWDAS method on both 10 mm and 2 mm spherical tumors embedded in a three dimensional computational electromagnetic block model of the breast.