A Wearable Microwave Antenna Array for Time-Domain Breast Tumor Screening

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Microwave Engineering

Background:

• Early breast cancer detection is crucial for effective treatment.
• Existing microwave imaging systems often require bulky equipment and immersion media.
• A wearable, non-invasive system could improve patient comfort and accessibility for breast health monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate a novel wearable patient interface for microwave breast cancer detection.
• To assess the performance of a wearable multistatic time-domain pulsed radar system.
• To compare the data quality from the wearable prototype with a previous table-based system.

Main Methods:

• Development of a wearable bra with 16 flexible antennas for multistatic time-domain pulsed radar.
• Daily testing of the wearable prototype on a healthy volunteer over a 28-day period.
• Comparison of collected signals and reconstructed images with data from a table-based prototype.

Main Results:

• The wearable prototype requires no immersion medium and simplifies breast surface localization.
• The wearable system is more cost-effective and has a smaller footprint than the table-based prototype.
• Data collected using the wearable prototype showed improved quality across all investigated measures compared to the table-based system.

Conclusions:

• The wearable microwave breast health monitoring array represents a significant advancement over previous designs.
• This proof-of-concept demonstrates the potential for a comfortable, accessible, and effective breast health monitoring application.
• Further optimization for various patient breast sizes and tissue densities is warranted.