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Study of the Effect of Fibroglandular Tissue in Tumor Detection Using Microwave Breast Imaging

Martins, R. A. ; Felício, J. M. ; Costa, J.R. ; Fernandes, C. A.

Study of the Effect of Fibroglandular Tissue in Tumor Detection Using Microwave Breast Imaging, Proc European Conference on Antennas and Propagation EuCap, Florence, Italy, Vol. , pp. - , March, 2023.

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Abstract
We evaluate the effect that fibroglandular tissue
has on tumor detection in radar-based microwave imaging
(MWI). MWI relies on the contrast between the dielectric
properties of healthy and malignant tissues, which may be as
low as 10%, thus hindering tumor identification. Here, we
performed measurements on a dry MWI setup, in the 2-5 GHz
frequency range, to scan anthropomorphic breasts with two
fibroglandular tissues, and a tumor placed at different
distances from the fibroglandular. Imaging results showed that
tumor identification in MWI is highly influenced by the
volume and shape of the fibroglandular tissue. Indeed, we find
that in most cases the tumor cannot be distinguished with
common image metrics because it is indistinguishable from the
fibroglandular. Yet, we verify that there are changes in the
magnitude of the confocal algorithm, which may open the
opportunity to machine learning techniques to detect it.