UWB Radar Technology for Imaging Applications

Microwave medical imaging has received considerable attention in recent years. Microwave systems are simple, cost-effective as compared to other modalities. The ultra-wideband technology provides high resolution fast data acquisition and detection, low microwave energy pulse and accurate localization of a target for imaging which are important aspects for electromagnetic medical applications. This chapter provides the state-of-art-techniques, methodologies and system level analysis related to UWB medical imaging with the focus on breast, brain, and heart imaging medical applications. Microwave techniques do not use ionizing radiation and thus the scans can safely be performed frequently, making them excellent candidates for diagnostic cancer screening. Based on an inherent contrast in the dielectric properties of healthy and malignant breast tissues, UWB technology has the potential to discriminate between cancerous growths and healthy or melanin tissues. UWB technology has also emerged as one of the preferred choices for through-wall detection that address to see inside structures to determine the layout of buildings, presence of persons within the buildings/mines during search, rescue, and emergency operations. The UWB through wall system exploits the fine time resolution, good wall penetration properties, high performance in challenging environments, and high range resolution of the UWB signals. Various antenna designs and signal processing algorithms for imaging purposes have been discussed in this chapter such as delay-and-sum (DAS) algorithms and its various modifications, synthetic aperture radar, Kirchhoff migration, compressed sensing (CS)-based approaches.