EARLY STAGE CANCER DETECTION TECHNIQUE CONSIDERING THE REFLECTED POWER FROM BREAST TISSUES

Ultra wideband (UWB) microwave imaging is the popular image reconstruction technique to be integrated in a medical equipment applied for early breast cancer detection system. The constructed breast cancer detector is low complexity, high accuracy rate, easy to perform tumour detection and low-cost production. To numerically design and to evaluate the electrical properties of the antenna system, a 3D homogeneous breast phantom and their interactions Ansoft HFSS v13 and CST Microwave Studio softwares were utilized. The operational bandwidth of the designed antenna ranges from 3.5 GHz to 7.2 GHz. In fact, the numerical evaluations were carried-out to determine the effect of various tumour sizes (10 mm, 20 mm and 30 mm) and the impact of the distance variations between the breast phantom surface and the tumour position. Towards the appropriate studies the reflected power analysis of the recorded return loss values was undertaken. The simulation results show that by increasing the tumour size, the received reflected power decreases. The effective distance of the early breast cancer monitoring system to work properly is less than 2 cm between tumour and breast phantom surface.