Discrete Dipole Approximation Based Microwave Tomography for Fast Breast Cancer Imaging

This article describes a fast microwave tomography reconstruction algorithm based on the 2-D discrete dipole approximation (DDA). Synthetic data from a finite-element-based solver and experimental data from a microwave imaging system are used to reconstruct images and to validate the algorithm. The microwave measurement system consists of 16 monopole antennas immersed in a tank filled with lossy coupling liquid and a vector network analyzer. The low-profile antennas and lossy nature of the system make the DDA an ideal forward solver in image reconstructions. The results show that the algorithm can readily reconstruct a 2-D plane of a cylindrical phantom. The proposed forward solver combined with the nodal adjoint method for computing the Jacobian matrix enables the algorithm to reconstruct an image within 6 s. This implementation provides significant time savings and reduced memory requirements and is a dramatic improvement over previous implementations.