Development of Analytical and Experimental Tools for Microwave Breast Imaging Research
Date
2010-12-15Author
Gao, Fuqiang
Advisor(s)
Van Veen, Barry
Hagness, Susan
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The incidence rate of breast cancer is the highest of any cancer among
women in the United States, and its mortality rate is second only to lung
cancer. It is well known that early detection is crucial to successful treatment
of breast cancer. X-ray mammography has been the standard clinical tools
for detecting and treating breast cancer for many years. However, the
sensitivity and specificity of this method are significantly lower in women
with extremely dense breasts, and it also involves breast compression and
exposure to ionizing. Hence, there is a critical need of alternative nonionizing
molecular imaging technologies that are capable of 3D tomographic
breast imaging and suitable for low-cost cancer screening particularly in
high-risk patients. Microwave imaging, which utilizes the dielectric contrast
between malignant and normal breast tissues, has shown great potential to
meet these needs in recent studies.
My master?s project involves development of both analytical and
experimental tools for microwave breast imaging research. In the analytical
part, the potential of incorporating both dielectric and elastic contrasts for
improving breast tumor detection is studied. This work resulted in a
comment that is published in IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation
Letters. In the experimental part, a technique to fabricate 3D realistic breast
phantom is successfully developed. The fabricated breast phantoms can be
used for rigorous pre-clinical validation of microwave breast imaging
systems. A manuscript based on this work has been submitted to a journal
for peer-review. Hence, the main body of this report consists of the
aforementioned two materials. The appendix includes the MATLAB codes
used to generate the results in the IEEE AWPL comment.