Ultra-High-Resolution Millimeter-Wave Imaging: A New Promising Skin Cancer Imaging Modality

Abstract

The goal of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using millimeter-wave imaging as a new medical imaging modality for the detection of skin cancer at early stages. In a recent large-scale study, the authors have demonstrated that statistically considerable contrasts exist between the millimeter-wave dielectric properties of normal skin and skin cancer tissues. In this work, an imaging system with a record-wide bandwidth of 98 GHz was developed using the synthetic ultra-wideband millimeterwave imaging approach, a new ultra-high-resolution imaging technique recently developed by the authors. Ex-vivo imaging experiments were conducted on two freshly-excised malignant skin tissues obtained from skin cancer patients having undergone Mohs micrographic surgeries at Hackensack University Medical Center. A programmable measurement platform was designed to automatically scan the tissues across a rectangular aperture plane. Furthermore, a novel frequency-domain imaging algorithm was developed to process the recorded signals and generate an image of the cancerous tissue. The obtained images correctly identified the tumor locations as verified by Mohs histological evaluations.