Dielectric properties of breast: A review

This paper reviews the historical dielectric studies together with more recent publications to establish the current knowledge of the dielectric properties of breast tissue with specific focus on the dielectric contrast between normal and diseased tissue. A comparison between historic and more recent publications, shows that conflicting ideas exist as to whether a significant difference between normal and diseased breast tissue exists. The large variability in the reported dielectric properties contributes significantly to these conflicting results. Also, most of the reported studies lack the reporting of accurate meta-data of the experimental setup and thus it is very difficult to merge and compare different datasets.