System Development of Microwave Induced Thermo-Acoustic Tomography and Experiments on Breast Tumor

Abstract

Abstract-Microwave induced thermo-acoustic tomography (MI-TAT) has become a keen research topic in recent years due to its great potential in early breast cancer detection. A secure and accurate MI-TAT system has been established. Some experiments have been made to demonstrate the performance of the MITAT system. Based on an experiment using phantom, some quantitative features of the system have been obtained. Some imaging experiments with real human breast cancer tissues are performed to demonstrate its effectiveness and the potential in clinical diagnosis. Images with both high contrast and fine spatial resolution are achieved by using time reversal mirror (TRM) technique in the imaging processing. Moreover, comparisons between the MITAT system result and an ultrasound imaging system result are made. From the comparison, the MITAT system shows its advantages of better contrast over the ultrasound imaging system. The system and the experiments in this paper verify the mechanism of MITAT for breast cancer detection and provide a prototype basis for clinical practice.

Evaluation of Contrast Enhancement by Carbon Nanotubes for Microwave-Induced Thermoacoustic Tomography

“…All the scanning procedures with 1.8 • step can be finished within two minutes. More details about the system can be found in [34]- [36]. …”

Analysis of Short Pulse Impacting on Microwave Induced Thermo-Acoustic Tomography

“…Fig. 4(b) shows a sketch map of the MITAT system which has been illustrated in [20,21]. The pulse width of the microwave generator is adjustable.…”

Thermoacoustic imaging over large field of view for three‐dimensional breast tumor localization: A phantom study

“…The imaging depth is affected by the penetration depth and the intensity of pulsed microwave, and the surface area is affected by the microwave radiation region. 18 For previously used frequencies of 3 and 6 GHz in TAI systems, the penetration depth of high-water content tissues such as skin and muscles are estimated to be only 3.2 and 1.2 cm, respectively, which are not adequate in applications requiring large FOV. Previous studies demonstrated that sufficient penetration depth can be achieved by using microwave operating at 434 MHz.…”