A comparison study between horn and vivaldi antennas for 1.5–6 GHz breast microwave radar imaging

Breast Microwave Radar is a novel imaging modality for breast cancer detection. This technology uses low power microwaves to illuminate the breast region and it generates a reflectivity map of the breast structures in which tumors can be detected. Although this imaging modality has been successful in limited clinical trials, additional work is needed to optimize several parameters of this technology to increase its use in routine clinical imaging procedures. One of the aspects that is crucial for the performance of a BMR system are the antennas used to record the datasets. In this study, the use of a novel horn antenna for BMR data collection is proposed. This antenna was used to record BMR datasets from synthetic phantoms that mimic the dielectric properties of breast tissues. Datasets from these phantoms were also collected using a Vivaldi antenna, which is a common design for current BMR systems. The results of this study show that images formed from datasets recorded using the horn antenna had a lower noise level and higher contrast compared to their counterparts corresponding to the Vivaldi antenna datasets.