Abstract
In this paper, an electrically small magnetic probe combined with principal components analysis (PCA) technique for microwave breast cancer detection is presented. The proposed magnetic probe is designed as an electrically small square loop antenna integrated with a matching network operating at 528 MHz. The concept of the proposed microwave detection is based on the shift in the resonance frequency of the near-field magnetic probe due to the presence of a tumor. The proposed magnetic probe is highly sensitive in detecting any changes or abnormality in the dielectric properties of the female breast tissues. Detecting the existence of the breast tumors is expected by estimating the variations in the scattering parameters of the probe's response. The PCA is a feature extraction technique applied to accentuate the variance in the sensor responses for both healthy and tumorous cases. It is shown that when a numerical realistic breast phantom with and without tumor cells is placed close to the magnetic probe in the near-field region, the probe is capable of distinguishing between healthy and tumorous tissues. In addition, the probe can identify tumors with various sizes placed in a specific location within the breast. As a proof of concept, the magnetic probe was fabricated and used to detect a 9 mm metallic sphere buried at three different locations inside a lump of chicken meat, mimicking both normal and tumorous breast tissues, respectively. The CST numerical simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the presented technique is an emerging modality for detecting breast tumors through an inexpensive and portable way.