Average dielectric properties of the human breast from ultra wide band transmission measurements

Microwave imaging systems are being developed for breast cancer screening, treatment follow-up and breast health monitoring. Several different methods are being investigated. Microwave tomography (1) uses an array of antennas to collect transmission data through the breast; a forward model and iterative algorithm are used to reconstruct a dielectric property map of the breast interior (Meaney et al., Breast Cancer Research, 2013). Radar based techniques (2) rely on reflections from breast tissues to reconstruct a scattering intensity map where high scatter indicates potential tumors (Fear et al., IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Techn., 2013). In this contribution, we report on a time domain spectroscopy technique using microwave transmission data between two antenna arrays. The resulting information is an average permittivity value of the breast over the interrogation frequencies, which is useful for both radar and tomography.