ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the dielectric characteristics of breast cancer tissues and confocal microwave imaging for breast cancer detection are described. Microwave imaging has been developed as a new diagnostic modality for breast cancer screening. The current standard modality for breast cancer screening is X-ray mammography. To extract the weaker target signal from the larger raw signal, an averaging method is developed to make the reference signal which is used to be subtracted from the original received signal. In order to remove the artifacts for confocal imaging, a two-stage rotational surface clutter suppression method is developed. In the signal selection stage, the degree of similarity is assessed using the correlation coefficient. The detectability of malignant tumors is demonstrated for excised breast tissues after mastectomy of the cancer surgery. The radar-based confocal imaging approach cannot provide quantitative dielectric properties of a target object, whereas microwave tomography can determine the quantitative distribution of the constitutive dielectric properties of the target object.
