Robust approach to skin location estimation for radar-based breast imaging systems

Increasingly complex breast models are being used to test emerging microwave imaging modalities. With the increased complexity, waveforms received from skin reflections may consist of contributions from multiple locations, resulting in signatures not examined with simpler models. For example, antennas placed near the chest wall or at significant distances from the breast have been found to receive multiple skin reflections. With these received signals, simple methods used to estimate skin location, such as peak detection, do not provide reliable results. In this paper, we apply a deconvolution technique to find the impulse response with respect to a known reflected signal. Results demonstrate that this method provides more reliable estimates of skin location and shows the ability to estimate two skin locations from a waveform exhibiting two dominant skin reflections.