A Quantitative Approach for Millimeter-wave Breast Cancer Imaging

The incidence rate of breast cancer among women worldwide shows an increasing trend. Early detection plays a key role in increasing women's chances of survival. Several breast-imaging methods are currently used. However, due to the limitations of each of them, the proposal of new methods for breast imaging is still a hot topic in the scientific community. Among the proposed solutions, microwave imaging systems are attracting great interest, thanks to the significant dielectric contrast between healthy and tumor tissues of the breast. Several prototypes with central frequencies from few to tens of GHz have been proposed, both based on radar and tomographic reconstructions. In this paper, a quantitative solution combining both approaches for millimeter wave imaging of the breast is proposed. In particular, the radar approach is used to quickly detect the possible presence of a suspicious region, while the derivation of the nature of the lesion is pursued via a tomographic approach. Here the main idea is presented, along with a possible road map for further developments.