MICROWAVE IMAGING OF BIOLOGICAL TISSUES: applied toward breast tumor detection

Microwave imaging is an efficient diagnostic modality for non-invasively visualizing dielectric contrasts of non-metallic bodies. An increasing interest of this field has been observed during the last decades. Many application areas in biomedicine have been issued, recently the breast tumor detection application using microwave imaging. Many groups are working in the field at the moment for several reasons. Breast cancer is a major health problem globally for women, while it is the second most common cancer form for women causing 0.3 % of the yearly female death in Sweden. Medical imaging is considered as the most effective way of diagnostic breast tumors, where X-ray mammography is the dominating technique. However, this imaging modality still suffers from some limitations. Many women, mostly young ones, have radiographically dense breasts, which means that the breast tissues containing high rates of fibroglandular tissues. In this case the density is very similar to the breast tumor and the diagnosis is very difficult. In this case alternative modalities like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) with contrast enhancement and Ultrasound imaging are used, however those are not suitable for large scale screening program.Another limitation is the false-negative and false-positive rate using mammography, in general 5–15 % of the tumors are not detected and many cases have to go though a breast biopsy to verify a tumor diagnosis. At last the mammography using breast compression sometimes painful, and utilizing ionizing X-rays. The big potential in microwave imaging is the reported high contrast of complex permittivity between fibroglandular tissues and tumor tissues in breasts and that it is a non-ionizing method which probably will be rather inexpensive. The goal with this work is to develop a microwave imaging system able to reconstruct quantitative images of a female breast. In the frame of this goal this Licentiate thesis contains a brief review of the ongoing research in the field of microwave imaging of biological ...