3D Sensitivity Zone Mapping in a Multi-Static, Microwave Breast Imaging Configuration

One of the keys to medical microwave tomography is understanding the sensitivity of transmit-receive signals to changes in the electromagnetic properties to be reconstructed. This information is embedded in the Jacobian matrix for traditional inverse problem approaches and is a function of transmitter-receiver design characteristics and associated signal radiation/detection patterns. Previous efforts focused primarily on the 2D imaging problem for which sensitivity maps were generated in a single plane. In this paper, we describe sensitivity maps for the full 3D problem for monopole transceivers and their implications for associated antenna array configurations, including imaging zone coverage and computational efficiency.