Effects on the Quality of Breast Microwave Imagery Using Different Antenna Beamwidths

Breast cancer incidence in women has increased from one in twenty in 1960 to one in eight today. Despite significant progress on traditional breast imaging and cancer detection techniques, such as X-ray mammography, limitations do persist and other alternative methods have been explored. One of such methods is breast microwave imaging (BMI). This paper presents the effect of the irradiation source beamwidth on the focus quality of BMI when wavefront reconstruction techniques are used to form the images. The data is assumed to be collected using a cylindrical scan trajectory. The theoretical basis is validated using simulated data