Pulse compression with minimum uncertainty: An efficient microwave medical imaging technique

A pulse compression technique that gives an optimum contrast and visibility of targets in radar-based medical imaging is presented. A smoothing window for microwave beamforming technique which more properly alleviates the effect of abrupt truncation in finite length signals with the aid of the uncertainty principle is utilized. It is found that using a closer output signal shape to the Gaussian pulse results in a lower uncertainty and ambiguity in the reconstructed images. Hence, when the back-scattered signal passes through a window whose uncertainty is the least, the visibility of the target in the imaged domain will be the highest with high signal-to-noise ratio and fine resolution in microwave medical imaging. The accumulation of the above properties together increases the chance of detecting any abnormality in the human body at early stages and thus resulting in a higher chance of survival. The idea is tested on a real-sized head model surrounded by an array of dipoles operating across the band 1.3-1.4 GHz. The results are compared with the most commonly used beamforming techniques to show the achieved improvements in practice.