A NOVEL TWO STEP PROCEDURE FOR MICROWAVE BREAST CANCER IMAGING

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One of the main treats for the woman's health is the breast cancer and a huge number of women lost their life every year. Today, early detection is the key approach in reducing the fatal effects of this disease and several approaches are in research progress in order to detect malignant tissues more accurately. On the other hand the use of electromagnetic waves in the microwave region for breast cancer imaging is becoming an emerging methodology. The experimental studies on the human tissues demonstrated that there is a significant contrast in dielectric properties between the malignant tumours and normal fatty tissue at microwave frequencies. The main motivation in using the microwaves for breast cancer imaging is that it is nonionizing, comfortable, sensitive to tumours, and specific to malignancies. Microwaves can also penetrate in lossy fatty tissue and their interaction with malignant tumours creates measurable scattered fields which can be used to extract information about the tissue dielectric-properties distribution or other tissue characteristics.

In the present talk, it will be presented a new and effective microwave tomography approach for the breast cancer detection and imaging. To this aim, the breast is illuminated by a time-harmonic continuous electromagnetic wave at microwave frequencies through an antenna system moving on a semi-spherical surface over the breast and the scattered electric field vector is measured by the same antenna system. The imaging method given here consists of two steps. In the first step, the scattered electric field vector is analytically continued to the breast surface via surface potentials together with Taylor expansions and the inhomogeneous surface impedance is calculated through the standard impedance boundary condition. Then, the detection is achieved by observing the contributions of the malignant tissues to the surface impedance. The surface impedance is a function of the operating frequency, material properties of the malignant tumour and these features allow one to detect, approximately locate and classify the tumours. In the second step, the material (dielectric coefficient and conductivity) and geometrical properties (location and shape) of the tumour are determined through the modification of the Contrast Source (CS) approach to the new measurement configuration. The method requires the Dyadic Green’s function of the body-breast configuration and it is calculated here by the adaptation of the Buried Object Approach and accelerated by the method of discrete complex images. A microwave breast cancer imaging system prototype which uses above mentioned approach is also created and will be used in clinical trials soon.

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4:50PM: Networking and Buffet Dinner

5:00PM-6:00PM: Talk/Presenation

Free dinner will be served at 4:50PM. All are welcome. You don't have to be IEEE member to attend the talk

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