Spatial Domain Indirect Holography for a Full Phaseless Approach to Biomedical Microwave Imaging

Microwave imaging approaches generally require the knowledge of the complex incident field distribution inside the imaging domain. This task can be accomplished by probing the observation domain, thus resulting in a time-consuming process, or assuming a numerical/simulated model. Alternatively, the incident field can be collected on the measurement domain, and the field distribution can be successfully retrieved on the whole imaging space. In this paper, a full phaseless, two-step strategy is described, where the phase of the incident field is retrieved by exploiting a spatial domain indirect holography technique, applied to the acquisition points only. The retrieved complex incident field can be so used for the reconstruction of the incident field inside the domain of interest. More specifically, a modal expansion technique and a source reconstruction method are adopted and compared to perform the above task. Once performing the characterization of the incident field distribution, the proposed strategy is included in the framework of a phaseless inverse scattering problem, where intensity-only data of the total field are involved. The effectiveness of the combined approach is demonstrated by considering an imaging scenario which involves a series of breast models as inhomogeneous targets.