Visualization of the breast tumor by the integrated use of CP-MCT and chirp pulse microwave breast radar

Chirp pulse microwave computed tomography (CP-MCT) is a modality for microwave imaging of biological objects. By using the high-resolution model, which uses the chirp pulse signal from 2 GHz to 3 GHz, diagnosis of an early stage breast tumor has been attempted mainly by numerical simulation. However, the FDTD-based numerical simulation showed that only diagnostic information provided by the tomographic images was not sufficient for localizing the tumor in the breast fat tissues. This is mainly due to the strong scattering at the surface of the breast and the boundary between the tumor and surrounding fat tissues because of the big difference in those permittivity values. To gain the compensative information, we have investigated feasibility of the breast radar, which provides the dosimetric image according to the same measurement principle as CP-MCT. The chirp pulse microwave breast radar (CP-MBR) can provide tumor information projected onto the imaging plane of CP-MCT. The numerical simulation of the breast radar shows that the integrated use of those microwave imaging systems is useful for localizing the early stage tumors in the breast.