Time Domain Analysis of UWB Breast Cancer Detection

Recently, there has been considerable effort to investigate ultra-wideband (UWB) technology for the purpose of breast cancer detection. Previous publications based on frequency sweep have shown that UWB imaging systems have the potential to detect small sized (less than 2 cm) tumors. This work provides measurement results of a UWB breast cancer detection system consisting of a pulse generator, wideband oscilloscope, and two compact ultra-wideband antennas. The antenna experimental results show that the return loss is below -10 dB from 3.4 GHz to 10 GHz. The backscattered signal from tumor stimulant is measured and used to perform detection experiments. An autoregressive (AR) model is used to extract the energy of signal from the noise background and to perform the detection. The comparable detection rate with mammography quantifies the feasibility of UWB breast cancer detection. The advantage of this work is that it experimentally shows the potential of a time domain processing UWB system to detect early breast cancer tumor and paves the way for future work