A novel UWB imaging system setup for computer-aided breast cancerv diagnosis

Microwave imaging using UWB radar has been proved as a promising technique for breast cancer diagnosis. However, most of the researches in this domain are based on simulated environment, due to the fact of complex system setup. Few groups have built up an actual UWB imaging system for real life experiment. In this paper we present a novel UWB imaging system setup for breast cancer diagnosis. The system consists of one horn antenna as the transmitter, and a 4-element linear planar antenna array as the receiver to collect the backscattered signal. Based on this system setup, we propose a data-driven approach using linear classifier to detect tumor presence and further explore tumor characteristics, without constructing the UWB image. This approach bypasses the complicated image reconstruction algorithm and ill-posed inverse problem. With the low complexity system setup, our data-driven approach gives promising results in the breast cancer diagnostic experiment. The experiment shows that this system setup can be adopted as a prototype for research project in computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer.