Microwave tomography: review of the progress towards clinical applications

Microwave tomography (MWT) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality with great potential for non-invasive assessment of functional and pathological conditions of soft tissues. This paper presents a review of research results obtained by the author and his colleagues and focuses on various potential clinical applications of MWT. Most clinical applications of MWT imaging have complicated, nonlinear, high dielectric contrast inverse problems of three-dimensional diffraction tomography. There is a very high dielectric contrast between bones and fatty areas compared with soft tissues. In most cases, the contrast between soft-tissue abnormalities (the target imaging areas) is less pronounced than between bone (fat) and soft tissue. This additionally complicates the imaging problem. In spite of the difficulties mentioned, it has been demonstrated that MWT is applicable for extremities imaging, breast cancer detection, diagnostics of lung cancer, brain imaging and cardiac imaging.