A Clinical Evaluation of Microwave Radiometric Imaging About Characterisation of Non Palpable Breast Tumours

Microwave radiometric imaging, i.e. the processing of a lot of radiometric data measured at different points of an area, is able to provide information about temperature gradients at a depth of up to several centimetres in the subcutaneous tissues. The present study starts again a clinical evaluation about diagnosis in cancerology undertaken previously, but with new means in terms of radiometric equipment and data processing. The clinical problem that is being tackled today is the characterisation of non-palpable breast tumours in terms of benignity or malignancy. In fact, the current diagnosis methods lead to too-many false negative answers and unnecessary surgery on some type of tumours. The aim of this new clinical evaluation is to answer to the question: can microwave radiometric imaging work as a diagnosis tool for routine examination ? Beyond this direct medical benefit, the aim of this radiometric technique is a remote quantitative thermometry by means of inversion of the radiometric images. This process is realised by a deconvolution of the absolute weighting functions and a regularisation procedure.