A novel antenna array design for breast cancer detection

Early detection of breast cancer in women is critical for proper and effective treatment. This, however, requires to precisely locate the position and size of the tumor in breast since tumor is very small at its early stage. Microwave imaging techniques provide an attractive and effective alternate to achieve these objectives compared to their conventional counterparts such as mammography. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-Ring Slots Ultra-Wide-Band (MRS-UWB) patch antenna that can be used for breast tumor detection. After confirming the measured and simulated results of a single antenna element, we extend our design to an antenna array with 18 antenna elements. We combine the previously introduced Confocal Microwave Imaging (CMI) algorithm with our proposed antenna array to locate the position and size of the breast tumor. In the proposed scheme, we use the back scattered data received on the antenna array along with the frequency-time domain transformation, i.e. Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT), to reconstruct the tumor image. The results show that the proposed antenna array with CMI is capable to detect a smaller size tumor even of the size of 1 mm with high resolution. Furthermore, the proposed antenna array design has smaller dimensions that make the design more practical and cost effective for the use.