Experimental Validation of the Effect of Compression on Simplified Phantoms in Microwave Tomography Applied to Breast Cancer Detection

In this letter, the effect of breast compression in microwave tomography (MT) for breast cancer detection is analyzed experimentally on a simplified phantom. For this purpose, the same inhomogeneous scatterer has been reconstructed using two phantoms representing two different levels of compression in a camera configuration. The developed phantom, based on some mechanical properties of breast tissues is presented, as well as the measurement procedure. The imaging capabilities of the camera configuration are briefly analyzed in order to quantify the effect of number of transmitters and receivers on the quality of the reconstructed images. Finally, the quality of the measurements and the reconstructed images from the two phantoms are compared in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the mean square error (MSE), respectively.