Experimental Validation of MWI Radar Approach Against a Multimodal Breast Phantom

Microwave Imaging (MWI) is an emerging technique, which can supplement other well-established imaging modalities in medical diagnostics. However, MWI is still far from clinical practice (only a few clinical trials have been conducted) as its performance needs further evaluation. Commonly used numerical simulations are not enough. Therefore, anthropomorphic phantoms for testing and benchmarking different MWI scanning setups and reconstruction algorithms represent a useful tool to bridge the numerical simulation environment to a more realistic diagnostic scenario. To this end, in this work we report about the experimental validation of a MWI radar approach against a new multimodal anthropomorphic breast phantom, we have recently developed, suitable for MWI, B-mode ultrasound, mammography, MRI and CT imaging modalities. In particular, microwave images are obtained by a radar approach called in-coherent Multiple Signal Classification (I-MUSIC).