Investigations on design analysis and application of uwb vivaldi antenna for microwave based breast cancer diagnosis system

Abstract

The main reason for breast cancer being the number one cancer among women is insufficient screening, diagnosis of the tumor at an extremely developed stage, and inaccessibility of appropriate medical facilities. The drawbacks of the current diagnostic tools lead to the development of a new imaging technique called a Microwave-based Imaging (MI) technique. MI technology uses electromagnetic radiation in the 1 GHz to 10 GHz frequency range for imaging the human organ. It works by exploiting the functional and physiological information encoded in form of dielectric properties to distinguish and characterize the different tissues and or pathologies. The MI system offers many rewards compared to the existing imaging system. It is an inexpensive, non-ionizing, and non-destructive testing procedure to identify the pathological conditions of human tissues for the medical analysis and intervention. It offers functional imaging without the use of contrast agents and effectively detects biological anomalies like tumors at an early curable stage. Further it reconstructs the permittivity and conductivity of the imaging object, unlike other imaging modalities. MI system consists of transmitting and receiving antennas that surround the object of interest. The antennas are an ultimate part of MI and therefore have a huge impact on the resulting image quality. The type of antenna used inside the MI system is deeply impacted by the operating frequencies, dielectric characteristics of the materials, target, and immersion medium. Many antennas have been developed and tested in the MI system, such as wideband dipole antenna, double ridged horn antenna, on the body matched bowtie, dielectric resonator antenna, and microstrip patch antenna. Even though the radiation characteristics of these above antennas are remarkable, the important requirement in the antenna design for the MI system is very compact geometry to prevent the complexity of the numerical solver model newline