An improved technique based on microwave thermoacoustic method for breast cancer screening

Abstract Thermoacoustic tomography is an emerging medical imaging technique combining the benefits of microwave imaging and ultrasound. This imaging method has a great potential to be used for breast cancer screening due to detecting early-stage breast cancer with high contrast and high resolution. It has been proven that applying a special regime of microwave pulses can evoke the resonance phenomenon in thermoacoustic. Here, the parameters affecting the intensity of the acoustic signal and the resonance phenomenon are examined. Then, a breast tumor detection technique is proposed based on utilizing the resonance phenomenon and the relationship between sample size and resonance bandwidth. The location of the tumor is also estimated by an explicit method. This technique eliminates the need for image reconstruction. In this method, the size and location of the tumor can be obtained using only three acoustic transducers. Finally, the precision of this method is compared with the time-reversal image reconstruction algorithm. The results demonstrate the feasibility of a safe, fast, and low-cost thermoacoustic detection method for skin and breast cancers.