A comparison of interpolation methods for breast microwave radar imaging

In recent years, breast microwave imaging (BMI) has shown its potential as a promising breast cancer detection technique. This imaging technology is based on the electrical characteristic differences that exist between normal and malignant breast tissues at the microwave frequency range. A promising image formation technique for BMI radar based approaches is wavefront reconstruction. In this approach, the image quality and execution time of this image formation technique is strongly affected by the interpolation method that is used. In this paper, a performance study between three popular interpolation techniques, nearest neighbor, linear and cubic splines, for breast microwave radar imaging is presented. The performance of the evaluated techniques was assessed using numeric phantoms obtained from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data sets. The results of this study indicate that linear interpolation techniques are the most suitable choices based on their computational cost, and the focal quality and signal to noise of their resulting images.