Multimodal tissue-mimicking breast phantoms for mm-wave and ultrasound imaging

Multimodal tissue-mimicking breast phantoms represent a useful instrument to validate the experimental imaging systems, as biological samples are not always available for the testing. In the context of cancer detection, multimodal imaging approaches are gaining increasing interest as they could provide complementary data about the investigated tissues. The aim of this work is to provide a brief review on the characterization of dielectric, mechanical and acoustic properties of breast phantoms and to prove that it is possible to design a tissue-mimicking material able to emulate different physical properties (i.e., real and imaginary part of the dielectric permittivity, Young’s modulus, ultrasound wave speed and attenuation) of the corresponding human tissues.