Fast Microwave Screening of Breast Tumors with a System-by-Design Inversion Strategy

The quantitative imaging of breast tumors through microwave measurements is addressed. An innovative solution approach based on the System-by-Design (SbD) paradigm is proposed to achieve a highly accurate reconstruction with limited computational resources. Towards this end, the inverse scattering problem (ISP) at hand is reformulated in terms of the differential electromagnetic (EM) quantities with respect to a reference/healthy scenario, enabling the exploitation of prior knowledge regarding the breast composition. The performance of the developed approach is investigated in numerical simulations considering realistic breast phantoms. The results indicate that highly accurate reconstructions are achieved even under a significant noise level. Furthermore, the developed approach only requires few minutes of processing, hinting at its applicability to real-world scenarios.