Design and Analysis of Antipodal Vivaldi Antennas for Breast Cancer Detection

This paper presents the design and analysis of antipodal Vivaldi antennas (AVAs) for breast cancer detection. In order to enhance the antenna gain, different techniques such as using the uniform and non-uniform corrugation, expanding the dielectric substrate and adding the parasitic patch are applied to original AVA. The design procedure of two developed AVA structures i.e., AVA with non-uniform corrugation and AVA with parasitic patch are presented. The proposed AVAs are designed on inexpensive FR4 substrate. The AVA with non-uniform corrugation has compact dimension of 50??50 mm2 or 0.28??L?? 0.28??L, where ??L is wavelength of the lowest operating frequency. The antenna can operate within the frequency range from 1.63 GHz to over 8 GHz. For the AVA with parasitic patch and uniform corrugation, the overall size of antenna is 50??86 mm2 or 0.24??L ??0.41??L. It can operate within the frequency range from 1.4 GHz to over 8 GHz. The maximum gain for AVA with non-uniform corrugation and AVA with parasitic patch and uniform corrugation are 9.03 and 11.31 dBi, respectively. The corrugation profile and parasitic patch of the proposed antenna are optimized to achieve the desired properties for breast cancer detection. In addition, the proposed AVAs are measured with breast phantom to detect cancerous cell inside the breast and the performance in detecting cancerous cell are discussed. The measured result can confirm that the proposed AVAs can detect unwanted cell inside the breast while maintaining the compact size, simple structure and low complexity in design.