Potentialities of Inverse Scattering Techniques for Breast Cancer Imaging at Millimeter-Waves Frequencies

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women in industrialized countries. Several microwave imaging systems have been proposed for the diagnosis of breast cancer, based on both the tomographic and radar approach, being tested in some cases even on real patients. However, the low working frequency of all these systems, which allows to reach non superficial targets, has been in some cases the main cause of a non-optimal resolution. Based both on the results of recent dielectric characterization campaigns on ex-vivo tissues of the human breast up to 50 GHz and on the promising achievements of the feasibility studies of mm-wave imaging systems, in this article, the tomographic approach to manipulate the simulated results of a linear radar scenario at the frequency of 30 GHz is proposed. In particular, two image reconstruction techniques, the Linear Sampling Method and the Born Approximation, are proposed and compared.