Development of electromagnetic approach for early breast tumor detection

Survival from breast cancer strongly linked to the size of the tumor at the detection stage. Thus, the early stage detection of tumor of size as minimum as 1.0 mm radius is of great research interest. Currently used techniques for breast cancer detection fails in 10-30% cases and it gives any positive results when the tumor grows in to a size more than 10.0 mm, this reduces the possibility for an early stage detection and thus the survival rate. Thus, in this paper an alternate method of breast cancer detection through microwave imaging is studied. A dielectric mixing model is used to compute the dielectric constant of the breast tissue with and without the malignant tissue and the proposed model is verified through the simulation in CST. Free space transmission and metal back method are used for the measurement of dielectric constant of the phantom containing one, two, three and four tumors of radius 1.0 mm each. The proposed dielectric mixing model can be applied to detect the changes in the dielectric constant of the tumor affected tissue of radius 1.0 mm which is not possible through any other existing methods.