Regional estimation of the dielectric properties of the breast: Skin, adipose, and fibroglandular tissues

A technique is presented that may be used to estimate dielectric properties in regions of an inhomogeneous dielectric object. For this preliminary investigation, we assume that the object may be characterized as having three distinct regions: a thin outer layer with uniform thickness and an interior with two regions having dissimilar dielectric properties. The technique is carried out in two steps. First, ultrawideband (UWB) reflection data are used to construct models indicating locations of the regions of interest. These reconstruction models are incorporated into the second step of the procedure which estimates the mean regional dielectric properties. The performance of the proposed technique is demonstrated with both reflection and transmission data generated by a 2D numerical model.