Level‐set techniques for microwave medical imaging

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Avda. Universidad, 30, 28911 Leganes, Madrid. Spain.Microwave tomographic imaging is showing significant promise as a new technique for the early detection of breast cancer.Its physical basis is the contrast between the dielectric properties of the healthy breast tissue and the malignant tumors atmicrowave frequencies. We propose and analyze a novel shape-reconstruction technique for the early detection of breastcancer from microwave data which is based on a level-set technique. The advantages of this method compared to moretraditional pixel-based approaches are well-defined boundaries and the incorporation of an intrinsic regularization in form ofa-priori assumptions about the general anatomical structure of breast that reduces the dimensionality of the inverse problemand thereby stabilizes the reconstruction. Our goal is not only to detect the tumors but to simultaneously determine theirapproximate locations, sizes and permittivity values.