Design of a UWB wide-slot antenna and a hemispherical array for breast imaging

A microstrip, fork fed, wide slot antenna, printed on high permittivity substrate has been developed for the transmission of ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) signals into the breast. The proposed antenna has been developed from an existing design using an in-house finite difference time domain (FDTD) program. The new antenna is shown to be of a compact size, has a wide impedance bandwidth and good transmission characteristics across the UWB frequency range, using a phantom equivalent to human breast tissue. The antenna is well-suited to its intended application in a breast-imaging array, and an array of 31 of these elements is presented herein for the first time.