Breast Tumor Detection Using Multistatic Microwave Imaging With Vivaldi Antennas Utilizing a Novel Preprocessing Stage in DAS Algorithm

A new imaging setup with a novel preprocessing stage is proposed in this work for the detection of early stage breast tumors. A multistatic imaging setup with nine antennas is made to detect multiple tumors embedded inside the lab-made realistic homogeneous and heterogeneous breast phantoms. An ultrawideband signal is transmitted from the transmitting antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA), and the received signals are collected by the remaining eight antennas connected to an RF switch matrix. The received signals are serially transmitted to the PC connected to the switching matrix via the vector network analyzer. The received signals are passed to the developed image reconstruction method, which is designed to image backscattered signal energy as a function of location to get a clear image of the tumors. Due to the stark discrepancy in dielectric characteristics between normal and malignant tissue, the tumor location and its dimensions are effectively extracted from the scanned data. The proposed method is described completely with proper qualitative and quantitative analysis. The effectiveness of the image reconstruction method with the novel preprocessing stage is demonstrated by carefully imaging the developed phantoms. Multiple tumors implanted within the fat layer of the homogeneous breast phantom and multiple tumors embedded within the gland layer of the heterogeneous breast phantom are clearly identified. The proposed approach is shown to offer a significant improvement in performance over the conventional delay and sum (DAS) technique as explained based on the signal-to-mean ratio (SMR) metric.