Signal analysis and phantom experiments for a miniaturized time-domain microwave breast health monitoring device

This work presents a miniaturized system for performing time-domain microwave scans to detect malignancies within breast tissue. The proposed changes miniaturize components of the system designed by the McGill Breast Cancer Detection Group. The aim of this paper is to present the implementation of the Adafruit Si5351 Clock Generator and the Furaxa Pulser as an alternative to the currently used large table-top and expensive Tektronix gigaBERT 1400 Clock Generator and Picosecond Model 3600 Impulse Generator respectively. The miniaturized and cost-effective components can be integrated to achieve a comfortable and compact medical imaging device. This paper validates the proposed changes to the system by comparing their signals at the relevant stages of the system. Moreover, a dataset is collected with the proposed system changes using realistic breast phantoms across a five day period.