Resonance microwave reflectometry for early stage skin cancer identification

A novel contactless, non-invasive early stage skin cancer diagnostic technique based on resonance microwave near field probing is proposed and experimentally evaluated using artificial dielectric skin model. The discrimination between the malignant tumors, benign lesions and healthy skin is based on the water content difference in cancerous and normal skin tissue which was confirmed experimentally in a number of biomedical studies. Two types of near field probes - a small helix antenna and a loaded subwavelength aperture are studied in this paper. These near field probes enable very efficient, resonance, electromagnetic coupling to lossy dielectrics which results in significant change of reflected off the inhomogeneity (e.g. tumor) signal with respect to the signal scattered off the background (healthy skin). It is shown that the typical resolution of a malignant tumor with a characteristic size of one tenth of a radiation wavelength can be discriminated with at least 6dB amplitude and 50 degrees phase contrast from healthy skin and with more than 3dB contrast from benign lesion of the same size.