Low-cost microwave biomedical imaging

Microwave biomedical imaging has the potential to be a future complementary diagnostic technique for cost-critical situations. The accessibility and portability of diagnostic imaging can mean accurate information is available where it is needed. The feasibility of microwave imaging has been demonstrated by using lab equipment such as vector network analyzers, which, whilst they are accurate, they are also large and expensive. Capturing the required signal responses can instead be performed by using software defined radio (SDR) technology, which due to its high manufacturing volumes can have a cost which is several orders of magnitude lower than a VNA. Although the performance of such a system might be lower than that of a full-sized VNA, the performance is still adequate for biomedical imaging applications. In this paper, an SDR-based system's performance is analyzed and shown to accurately detect an abnormality within a head phantom.