Computation of Effective Dielectric Properties Using Dielectric Mixing Model Approach for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Breast cancer imaging technology requires the artificial breast phantom for early-stage breast cancer testing. The creation of a breast phantom that can replicate the dielectric properties found in real breast tissue holds significant importance in the optimization of the imaging system where computation of the effective dielectric properties of the breast, with and without the tumor needs more attention. Therefore, in this paper, an attempt has been made to develop the dielectric mixing model approach which may represent the real scenario of breast cancer like breast with different size of the tumor. This paper is also proposed to fabricate the phantom using gelatin and water and different size of tumor such as 2 mm, 4 mm, 6 mm, 8 mm and 10 mm which has been inserted in the phantom, and obtained result were compared with dielectric mixing model approach. The dielectric properties of a fabricated phantom, and phantom embedded with different sizes of tumor, were obtained using an open-ended coaxial probe method and computed the effective dielectric properties using dielectric mixing model approach spanning the frequency range from 1 GHz to 10 GHz. It is observed that the measurement results are in quite good agreement with the result of the dielectric mixing model. The main aim of the paper is to observe the change in dielectric properties when the tumor sizes are changing and it is found that there are considerable changes in dielectric with different dimension of the tumor in the frequency range 1 GHz to 10 GHz.