Design and modeling of a microwave imaging system for breast cancer detection

The main focus of the present paper is the design and construction of a microwave-imaging system prototype for use in research towards early breast cancer detection. To design and optimize the proposed system prototype, in particular to model the wideband antenna that acts as transmitter/receiver, a finite element method (FEM) approach is used. For signals generation and acquisition, low-cost yet high-precision off-the-shelf components replace a costly vector network analyzer (VNA). Even though the prototype is still under development, the agreement between simulations and measurements, the comparison with a reference VNA, and the validation with a commercial solver (FEKO) are encouraging.