Evaluation of Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves in a Microwave Apparatus for Breast Lesions Detection

Microwave imaging has received increasing attention in the last decades, in particular for its application in breast lesions detection. Such effort has been encouraged by the fact that, at microwave frequencies, it is possible to distinguish between tissues with different dielectric properties. In such a framework, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for a novel microwave apparatus for breast lesions detection are empirically determined here through clinical examinations on 22 healthy breasts and on 29 breasts having lesions (including carcinoma, fibroadenoma, and microcalcifications). The apparatus operates in air, with 2 antennas, and uses a Huygens Principle based algorithm to generate images, which are homogeneity maps of tissues' dielectric properties.