Development of Antenna for Microwave Imaging Systems for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Motivation: Breast cancer is a major health problem globally for women causing an appreciable percentage of the yearly female death. Microwave imaging is a promising method in biomedical applications such as breast cancer detection due to its good penetration property, non-ionizing and non-invasive nature which has the potential to be a complementary modality to standard mammography. In this paper, An UWB Microstrip-fed Vivaldi antenna for microwave imaging systems aimed for an early breast cancer detection is developed. Results: The Vivaldi antenna is designed to operate between 8.821 to 22.30 GHz with dimensions of 44.85 × 25.28 mm that permits good radiation within the frequency range. To achieve UWB performance, Taconic TLC-32 substrate which has relative permittivity of 3.2 has been used to simulate the antenna by using Antenna Magus Software. The simulation results show that the return loss is better than -10dB within the range of 7.143 GHz to 24.60 GHz with the maximum return loss of -37.56 dB at 18.39 GHz. However, due to difficulties in antenna fabrication at higher frequencies, a low frequency of about 2.4 GHz is considered. Antenna measurements presents good radiation pattern that suit medical imaging systems to detect breast tumors. The amount of reflection is also found to be minimum for the antenna design frequency (2.4 GHz) which appears to be -26.34 db.