Magnetic nanoparticle as contrast agent for microwave breast cancer imaging

This communication presents a microwave strategy for early breast cancer detection, which exploits magnetic nanoparticle (MNP) as contrast agent to artificially induce a magnetic anomaly localized into the cancer. The strategy estimates the anomaly by processing the difference of two data sets obtained owing to the capability of switching on and off the magnetic susceptibility by means of an applied static polarizing magnetic field. By doing so, data depending only on the magnetic anomaly are obtained and the imaging is faced as a linear inverse scattering problem. In particular, the back-propagation procedure, formulated for the magnetic case, is applied. Numerical examples provide a preliminary assessment of the achievable reconstruction capabilities and the robustness against measurement noise as well as the uncertainty on the electric scenario surrounding the MNP.