An Experimental and Theoretical Investigation into Capabilities of a UWB Microwave Imaging Radar System to Detect Breast Cancer

An experimental and theoretical study concerning capabilities of an ultra wideband (UWB) microwave radar to detect breast cancer is presented. A simple phantom, consisting of a cylindrical plastic container with a low dielectric constant material imitating fatty tissues and a high dielectric constant object emulating tumour, is scanned over a circular cylindrical surface with an UWB probe antenna. Following the collection of an experimental data, spatial images of the breast phantom are formed using two different approaches. One neglects and the other one compensates for the signal drop with distance. The approach compensating for the received signal drop enables a successful detection of tumour targets with a diameter as small as 5 mm just by visual inspection of the produced image. In the theoretical investigations, a finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is applied to obtain a further insight into the experimental results.