Database Technique for Tumor Detection and Dielectric Profile Estimation

Bio-medical imaging techniques help in detection the tumor and finding the exact location of tumor cells inside the body. But these techniques are time consuming and the setup required is bulky. They also require a prior information about dielectric properties of tissue to give accurate imaging results. Quite useful bits of information regarding tumor and dielectric profile can be extracted from simple measurement and simulation procedure. Earlier, dielectric profile of biological tissue was provided using dielectric probe and waveguide fixture techniques. These methods provided reasonable estimates, but the setup which was used is limited to small portion of tissues and were not able to accommodate body part as a whole. In this paper, a new technique is devised to analyze the dielectric profile of breast tissues with and without tumor cells using free space transmission method and database approach. The measurement setup is used to obtained the transmission parameters in free space keeping the tissue under test in between the transmitter and receiver antenna. Database of simulated transmission parameter is created keeping all sets of variations in tissue types using Debye model. The complex permittivity is then arrived at by matching the measured transmission parameter data with the database. This technique was validated using simulated realistic breast phantoms and tested with results from mouse tumor cells.