Non-invasive Microwave Breast Cancer Detection - A Comparative Study

Microwave-based diagnosis techniques for breast cancer detection and monitoring have gained a lot of attention due to the microwave technology's mature, safe and relatively low cost attributes. In this paper, a radiator design is studied for breast malignancy detection based on the microwave characteristics of the malignant breast. The detector was originally introduced in a recent paper published by this group. Here, the detection performance is studied when a modification is made to the design. To elaborate, the effect of having the radiator structure covered with a conductive layer is analyzed and compared with its original configuration. The radiating structure consists of sixteen curved dipole antennas attached to a low permittivity, hemisphere-shaped structure. The radiator covers the frontal section of the breast. It is clearly demonstrated here that, for a variety of tumor cases (shapes and locations), the addition of conductor cover provides a detection rate that is substantially larger than that offered by a scenario where the conductor cover is not deployed. There are also a few cases in which this conclusion is controverted. The tumor signatures are studied at 1.2GHz by calculating the changes in the electric field magnitude and phase.