Coherent time reversal minimum variance beamforming for the localization of tissue malignancies in dense breast phantoms

The time reversal (TR) based minimum variance beamforming, both the standard capon beamforming (SCB) and robust capon beamforming (RCB) techniques for microwave imaging of breast for early stage breast cancer detection is considered in this paper. The performance of coherent signal subspace processing for TR-SCB and TR-RCB techniques is investigated. We have used anatomically realistic numerical breast phantoms in FDTD simulations. We consider 2D sagittal slice of the breast phantom in 2D FDTD simulation. Our simulation results indicate that coherent signal subspace processing significantly improves the performance of TR based minimum variance beamforming techniques.