System development of microwave induced thermo-acoustic tomography and experiments on breast tumor

Microwave induced thermo-acoustic tomography (MI- TAT) has become a keen research topic in recent years due to its great potential in early breast cancer detection. A secure and accurate MI- TAT system has been established. Some experiments have been made to demonstrate the performance of the MITAT system. Based on an experiment using phantom, some quantitative features of the system have been obtained. Some imaging experiments with real human breast cancer tissues are performed to demonstrate its effectiveness and the potential in clinical diagnosis. Images with both high contrast and fine spatial resolution are achieved by using time reversal mirror (TRM) technique in the imaging processing. Moreover, comparisons between the MITAT system result and an ultrasound imaging system result are made. From the comparison, the MITAT system shows its advantages of better contrast over the ultrasound imaging system. The system and the experiments in this paper verify the mechanism of MITAT for breast cancer detection and provide a prototype basis for clinical practice. © 2010 EMW Publishing. All Rights Reserved.