Miniaturized UWB Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna for a mechatronic breast cancer imaging system

Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) can be fused with microwave Nearfield Radar Imaging (NRI) in order to improve breast cancer detection. This paper presents the design of a new miniaturized ultra-wideband Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA), which can be used in such a hybrid DBT/NRI mechatronic imaging device. The antenna is miniaturized by using a coupling media and a substrate that have a high effective dielectric constant. Preliminary results show that the designed antenna has a return loss above 9 dB in a 2.5 GHz frequency band.