Conductivity Estimation of Breast Cancer Using COMSOL® Modeling of Microwave Scattering and Frechet Mean Estimate of Covariance

A. Jeremic[1], E. Khoshrowshahli[2]
[1]Electrical & Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
[2]Biomedical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
Published in 2014

Breast cancer detection is one of the most important problems in health care and it is second most frequent cancer according to WHO. It is recommended that women over fifty or even younger in some cases do a screening test every two years. Besides clinical breast examination, there are number of imaging methods used for this purpose, such as mammography, ultrasound and MRI. Among them, mammography is the one which is mostly used for screening purpose, but it has been recently proposed that microwave imaging could be used as a cheaper and safer alternative. From a physical standpoint breast cancer can be modeled as a scatterer with a significantly (tenfold) larger conductivity than a healthy tissue. In our previous work we proposed a maximum likelihood based method for detection of cancer which estimates the unknown parameters by minimizing the residual error vector assuming that the error can be modeled as a multivariate (multiple antennas) random variable.