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

Publication Type:

Journal Article

Authors:

Porter, Emily; Bahrami, Hadi; Santorelli, Adam; Benoit Gosselin; Rusch, Leslie A; Popovic, Milica

Source:

IEEE Trans Med Imaging, Volume 35, Issue 6, p.1501-9 (2016)

Keywords:

Breast, Breast Neoplasms, Clothing, Diagnostic Imaging, Early Detection of Cancer, Equipment Design, Female, Humans, Microwaves, Middle Aged, Monitoring, Ambulatory

Abstract:

<p>In this work, we present a clinical prototype with a wearable patient interface for microwave breast cancer detection. The long-term aim of the prototype is a breast health monitoring application. The system operates using multistatic time-domain pulsed radar, with 16 flexible antennas embedded into a bra. Unlike the previously reported, table-based prototype with a rigid cup-like holder, the wearable one requires no immersion medium and enables simple localization of breast surface. In comparison with the table-based prototype, the wearable one is also significantly more cost-effective and has a smaller footprint. To demonstrate the improved functionality of the wearable prototype, we here report the outcome of daily testing of the new, wearable prototype on a healthy volunteer over a 28-day period. The resulting data (both signals and reconstructed images) is compared to that obtained with our table-based prototype. We show that the use of the wearable prototype has improved the quality of collected volunteer data by every investigated measure. This work demonstrates the proof-of-concept for a wearable breast health monitoring array, which can be further optimized in the future for use with patients with various breast sizes and tissue densities.</p>