Tradeoff study of microwave imaging for biomedical application

The quality of microwave imaging depends on two factors: the resolution and contrast of microwave images. The resolution of microwave image is dominated by the bandwidth of microwave signal; whereas, the contrast depends on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) - the higher the SNR is, the better the contrast of the images is. In general the wider the bandwidth of a signal has, the higher the frequency will be, which in turn causes more serious attenuation during wave propagation inside tissues. The resulting SNR is then degraded. Thereby, there is a tradeoff between the resolution and contrast of microwave images. This paper intends to study the tradeoff of the high quality microwave imaging based on a new communication scheme. In particular, we consider an multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) approach for breast tumor detection. Conducted computer simulations show that this scheme can get a better target identification capability and improved SNR and that it can attain a better tradeoff between resolution and penetration depth.