UWB Microwave Imaging System For Early Breast Cancer Detection

Ultra-wideband(UWB) microwave imaging usually utilizes the microwave signal whose frequency is no more than 10GHz,and bandwidth exceeds GHz to detect objects.The method can assure the detecting depth and high resolution,for another one,it is sensitive to detect the early breast tumors,so it attaches a lot of attentions in near field imaging aspect including detecting early breast tumors,and which has the potential to become a viable alternative to conventional X-ray mammography.To detect the early breast cancer with UWB microwave in the future,three ultra-wideband microwave probes are designed,an UWB microwave imaging system for near-field imaging is also set up,and then the poles of the targets' are extracted and analyzed.The physical basis of breast cancer detection with UWB microwave is discussed in the article,and the demand of the system in detecting early breast cancer is analyzed.On the base of it,three UWB microwave antennas are designed and manufactured,whose tested results indicate that they all have the ultra-wideband characters and the frequency band is about from 1.36GHz to 20GHz.The three probes can be used in detecting targets in near-field with UWB microwave,including detecting early breast cancer.The receive/send structure is introduced into one of the three probes to be easier to system calibrated.UWB microwave imaging system is set up composed of impulse generator, sampling oscilloscope,compact UWB probe,and data acquisition controlling module for demonstration of near-field imaging.The backscattered signals from different angles of the sent microwave are sampled by the oscilloscope,and then the signals are analyzed and dealt with to eliminate the effect of the environment.The microwave confocal imaging algorithm is used for target imaging and the reconstruction of a metal plate with a radius of 10mm embedded in PVC foam indicates that the size and position of the object can be precisely imaged by the system.Therefore,high feasibility of the imaging method is developed to detect objects in near-field,which establishes the foundation of developing early breast cancer detection imaging system.Then,we use the above data of the metal target and the data of muscle and fat target with equal volume as the metal target to extract the poles of them with Proney method.The poles extracted from the tested data are compared with the poles extracted from the simulation data.The result demonstrates that different character, position and volume are with different targets' poles,so we can distinguish the different object.