Application specific instrumentation and its feasibility for UWB sensor based breast cancer diagnosis

In this correspondence we introduce a novel instrumentation strategy which we term as application specific instrumentation (ASIN) and we test the feasibility of the proposed scheme in designing a simulation based breast cancer diagnosis system using ultrawideband (UWB) sensors. Most of the high end instrumentation facilities of the current generation are generic in the sense that they can be used in more than one usage. Hence, they perform in a analysis mode. Using these high end instruments information is extracted for a given object under test and based on these information certain decision is made. This generic nature of the instruments make them costly and the postprocessing requirements require the contribution from specialists. In the proposed ASIN scheme, the observations from the sensors are directly used to make the required decision without extracting any intermediate information. This in turn makes the system highly specialised for a given application. At the same time this reduce the cost and the demand for specialists. We have tested the feasibility of such a system in breast cancer diagnosis using UWB sensors. The analysis, though based on simulated data, shows that the system is feasible. Such a strategy will prove invaluable in making application specific instruments ubiquitous. More than this, the low-cost and reduced demand for specialists features of ASIN make it suitable for exploration in numerous usages in the developing nations.