Microwave and Induced Thermoacoustic Dual Imaging for Potential Breast Cancer Detection

Microwave imaging (MWI) and microwave thermoacoustic imaging (MTAI) show great potential for early-stage breast tumor detection. MWI suffers from low spatial resolution for accurate diagnosis, while MTAI is unable to provide quantitative dielectric information and its image quality degrades due to acoustic heterogeneity of breast tissue. To compensate for these drawbacks, we propose a microwave-based dual imaging modality, by combining the conventional MWI and MTAI, for breast tumor detection. First, a low-resolution MWI image will be utilized to provide a rough estimate of the high-dielectric region in breast. Then, the high-dielectric region will be incorporated in MTAI reconstruction to mitigate the acoustic heterogeneity effect. Finally, medical images with ultrasonic resolution and quantitative dielectric information of breast tissue can be obtained. We verified this idea by imaging anatomically realistic numerical breast phantoms. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed dual imaging modality by significantly improving the image fidelity and providing quantitative dielectric information.