Microwave Mammography Enabling Pathological Diagnosis

Because the microwave tomography which solves the inverse scattering problem, reconstructs a tomographic image of the electric constant distribution of an object, it is expected to be applicable to an apparatus used for pathological diagnosis. We measured and analyzed the complex permittivity of breast tissue surgically removed from a breast cancer patient. It was found that the conductivity distribution of the cancer tissue is separated from the distribution of other tissues when expressed based on parameters of the Debye model instead of the frequency-dependent complex permittivity. The distribution of the Debye model parameters in the breast can be estimated by solving the inverse scattering problem. Herein, we show that it is possible to identify cancerous areas through a computer simulation.