In this paper, we describe a 2-D wideband microwave imaging system intended for biomedical imaging. The system is capable of collecting data from 3 to 6 GHz, with 24 coresident antenna elements connected to a vector network analyzer via a 2 x 24 port matrix switch. As one of the major sources of error in the data collection process is a result of the strongly coupling 24 coresident antennas, we provide a novel method to avoid the frequencies where the coupling is large enough to prevent successful imaging. Through the use of two different nonlinear reconstruction schemes, which are an enhanced version of the distorted born iterative method and the multiplicative regularized contrast source inversion method, we show imaging results from dielectric phantoms in free space. The early inversion results show that with the frequency selection procedure applied, the system is capable of quantitatively reconstructing dielectric objects, and show that the use of the wideband data improves the inversion results over single-frequency data.

With respect to the microwave imaging of the dielectric properties in an imaging region, the full derivation of a new inversion algorithm based on the contrast source inversion (CSI) algorithm and a finite-element method (FEM) discretization of the Helmholtz differential operator formulation for the scattered electromagnetic field is presented. The unknown dielectric properties are represented as nodal values on a two-dimensional (2D) arbitrary triangular mesh using linear basis functions. The use of FEM to represent the Helmholtz operator allows for the flexibility of having an inhomogeneous background medium, as well as the ability to accurately model any boundary shape or type: both conducting and absorbing. The resulting sparse and symmetric FEM matrix equation can be solved efficiently, and it is shown how its solution can be used to calculate the gradient operators required in the conjugate-gradient CSI update without storing the inverse of the FEM matrix. The inversion algorithm is applied to conductive-enclosures of various shapes and unbounded-region microwave tomography configurations where the 2D transverse magnetic (TM) approximation can be applied.

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