Abstract-A biconical antenna has been developed for ultrawideband sensing. A wide impedance bandwidth of around 115% at bandwidth 3.73-14 GHz is achieved which shows that the proposed antenna exhibits a fairly sensitive sensor for microwave medical imaging applications. The sensor and instrumentation is used together with an improved version of delay and sum image reconstruction algorithm on both fatty and glandular breast phantoms. The relatively new imaging set-up provides robust reconstruction of complex permittivity profiles especially in glandular phantoms, producing results that are well matched to the geometries and composition of the tissues. Respectively, the signal-to-clutter and the signal-to-mean ratios of the improved method are consistently higher than 5 dB and 10 dB, corresponding to an average increase in image fidelity of more than 140% compared to conventional radar focusing technique.

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The interest in the use of ultra-wide band (UWB) impulses for medical imaging, particularly early stage breast cancer detection, is driven by safety advantage, super resolution capability, significant dielectric contrast between tumours and their surrounding tissues, patient convenience and low operating costs. However, inversion algorithms leading to recovery of the dielectric profile are complex in their nature, and vulnerable to noisy experimental conditions and environment. In this paper, we present a simplified yet robust gradient-based iterative image reconstruction technique to solve the nonlinear inverse scattering problem. The calculation is based on the Polak–Ribière's approach while the Broyden's formula is used to update the gradient in an iterative scheme. To validate this approach, both numerical and experimental results are presented. Animal derived biological targets in the form of chicken skin, beef and salted butter are used to construct an experimental breast phantom, while vegetable oil is used as a background media. UWB transceivers in the form of biconical antennas contour the breast forming a full view scanning geometry at a frequency range of 0–5 GHz. Results indicate the feasibility of experimental detection of millimetre scaled targets.

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