High Resolution In-Situ Skin Cancer Microwave Imaging Using Super Wideband Antenna

This paper investigates the capability of a super wideband (SWB) antenna based imaging system in early-stage skin cancer detection. The imaging system consists of eight antenna elements in a circular array positioned around a human trunk phantom modeled as five concentric layers of skin, fat, muscle, rib bone and lung tissues. The dielectric properties of the phantom tissues are calculated using Cole-Cole model. The skin tumor is modeled as cylindrical shape on the outer skin layer with 1mm thickness and 15mm diameter. The resulting S-parameters of healthy and malignant phantoms obtained over different frequency ranges are compared and used to reconstruct the 2D images of the trunk area. The results show that the proposed SWB imaging system can detect and localize in-situ skin cancer with relatively high accuracy.