Including antenna models in microwave imaging for breast cancer screening

Microwave imaging is emerging as a tool for screening for breast cancer, but the lack of methods for including the characteristics of the antennas of the imaging systems in the imaging algorithms limits their performance. In this paper, a method for incorporating the full antenna characteristics, in terms of the transmission-matrix representation, in a frequency-domain imaging algorithm is presented. The algorithm is tested on a simulation of the physical-anomaly tomography (PAT) scanner imaging system developed at the Technical University of Denmark and is shown to have superior performance when compared to a simple algorithm in which the antennas are assumed to be ideal dipoles.