Reduction of skin reflections in radar-based microwave breast imaging

Radar-based microwave breast imaging is a prospective complementary imaging method that relies on dielectric property differences. One of the main challenges is removing the overwhelming reflection associated with the skin. In this paper, a skin subtraction method that can be applied to data generated with a realistic three dimensional breast model is presented. The method estimates the skin response of the target antenna as a filtered combination of its neighbors with the use of a modified recursive least squares algorithm and a generalized cross validation technique. The neighbors are selected based on their proximity and their spatial correlation to the target antenna. The method´s ability to subtract the skin response and preserve the tumor response is demonstrated.