A Correlated Microwave-Acoustic Imaging method for early-stage cancer detection

Microwave-based imaging technique shows large potential in detecting early-stage cancer due to significant dielectric contrast between tumor and surrounding healthy tissue. In this paper, we present a new way named Correlated Microwave-Acoustic Imaging (CMAI) of combining two microwave-based imaging modalities: confocal microwave imaging(CMI) by detecting scattered microwave signal, and microwave-induced thermo-acoustic imaging (TAI) by detecting induced acoustic signal arising from microwave energy absorption and thermal expansion. Necessity of combining CMI and TAI is analyzed theoretically, and by applying simple algorithm to CMI and TAI separately, we propose an image correlation approach merging CMI and TAI together to achieve better performance in terms of resolution and contrast. Preliminary numerical simulation shows promising results in case of low contrast and large variation scenarios. A UWB transmitter is designed and tested for future complete system implementation. This preliminary study inspires us to develop a new medical imaging modality CMAI to achieve real-time, high resolution and high contrast simultaneously.