A pulsed confocal microwave technique for the detection of dielectric contrast of breast tissue

Confocal microwave technology is explored as a screening tool to detect regions of dielectric contrast in breast tissue. When exposed to microwaves, malignant breast tissue exhibits electrical properties that are significantly different front that of healthy breast tissue. In vitro studies of normal and cancerous samples of breast tissue are performed using a prototype of confocal microwave imaging. Experimentally obtained time-domain results are substantiated by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) analysis. Dielectric permittivities of the samples are estimated from the experimentally obtained time-domain results and are validated by subjecting the samples to dielectric studies using a cavity-perturbation technique. The results are compared with the dielectric parameters of in vitro breast tissue data available in literature. (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.