Feasibility study of a novel microwave breast cancer imaging approach exploiting Magnetic Nanoparticle as contrast agents

The paper deals with Microwave Imaging (MWI) of breast cancer and aims at investigating the feasibility of an approach, recently proposed, which exploits Magnetic Nanoparticles (MNP) as magnetic contrast agents selectively delivered to the tumor. The numerical study herein presented is mainly devoted to test the reconstruction capabilities of the approach in quasi realistic conditions. To this purpose, 3D anthropomorphic breast phantom and an experimental characterization of the MNP response have been considered.