A COTS-Based Microwave Imaging System for Breast-Cancer Detection

Microwave imaging is an emerging breast cancer diagnostic technique, which aims at complementing already established methods like mammography, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound. It offers two striking advantages: no-risk for the patient and potential low-cost for national health systems. So far, however, the prototypes developed for validation in labs and clinics used costly lab instruments such as a vector network analyzer (VNA). Moreover, the CPU time required by complex image reconstruction algorithms may not be compatible with the duration of a medical examination. In this paper, both these issues are tackled. Indeed, we present a prototype system based on low-cost and off-the-shelf microwave components, custom-made antennas, and a small form-factor processing system with an embedded field-programmable gate array for accelerating the execution of the imaging algorithm. We show that our low-cost system can compete with an expensive VNA in terms of accuracy, and it is more than 20x faster than a high-performance server at image reconstruction.