MammoWave Breast Imaging Device: Prospective Clinical Trial Results and AI Enhancement

Microwave imaging is a safe new technology for breast imaging, avoiding ionizing radiation and the patient discomfort due to breast compression. In this paper we present results from the first prospective microwave breast imaging study where both symptomatic and asymptomatic subjects were recruited. For this purpose, a novel microwave imaging device (MammoWave) was examined on 353 women enrolled in the study to allow distinction between breasts with and without radiological findings. We investigated MammoWave’s performance using both features from the reconstructed images (prospective investigation) and through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) models (retrospective investigation). Our results indicate the importance of AI for specificity enhancement, and show a sensitivity greater than 80% for all the investigations. These high sensitivity values are maintained when considering breast cancers only.