Metamaterial Loaded Nine High Gain Vivaldi Antennas Array for Microwave Breast Imaging Application

In this article, a metamaterial loaded high gain nine antennas based microwave breast imaging system has presented to detect an unwanted tumour in the breast phantom. The proposed antenna is designed on a modified version of a basic Vivaldi antenna. Single negative metamaterial structure has been loaded to the modified version Vivaldi to enhance far-field antenna properties like gain and radiation pattern, which is essential for the breast imaging system. The proposed antennas have achieved -10dB impedance bandwidth of 8.45 GHz (2.0- 10.45 GHz) and 7.9 dBi maximum gain in the operating band. To verify the time-domain performance, the fidelity factor is also calculated for the face-to-face orientation, which is near about 92.89%. After optimisation in high load phantom, near field directivity (NFD) is also analysed with the workload to ensure that the near field radiation properties. Finally, the nine metamaterial (MTM) antennas arrays are placed around the breast phantom in a hemispherical order to take the data of scattering parameters for tumour object analysis in a CST simulation environment. The extracted data has been processed through an imaging algorithm to reconstruct the image for identifying the unwanted tumour object inside the breast phantom.