Preliminary Assessment of the Origin of Spurious Magnetic Effects in Magnetic Nanoparticle Enhanced Microwave Imaging

Magnetic nanoparticles enhanced microwave imaging has a great potential in breast cancer diagnosis. In fact, thanks to the non-magnetic nature of human issues, it would allow high specificity diagnosis already at early stages. To meet this goal, a crucial requirement is to design and built an imaging device free of spurious magnetic effects, which could hide the useful signal due to the magnetic nanoparticles targeted to the tumor or induce false positives. In particular, spurious effect -free measurements must be ensured up to the precision required to gather the very low useful signal. In this communication, we report the preliminary results on an investigation aimed to assess the origin of the possible spurious magnetic signals, in order to devise effective actions for their elimination.