A low-cost, fast, and accurate microwave imaging system for breast cancer detection

In this paper we present a prototype of a Microwave Imaging (MI) system for breast cancer detection. Our system is based on low-cost off-the-shelf microwave components, custom-made antennas, and a small form-factor processing system with an embedded Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for accelerating the execution of the imaging algorithm. We show that our system can compete with a vector network analyzer in terms of accuracy, and it is more than 20x faster than a high-performance server at image reconstruction.