Experimental Assessment of Axillary Lymph Node Microwave Tomography Using Anthropomorphic Phantoms

• Autor(a) principal: Savazzi, Matteo
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Karadima, Olympia, Duarte, David O. Rodriguez, Tobon, Jorge, Vipiana, Francesca, Kosmas, Panagiotis, Fernandes, Carlos A., Felicio, Joao M., Conceicao, Raquel C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/56384
• topic: axillary lymph node imaging; breast cancer; distorted Born iterative method (DBIM); limited angular information; medical microwave imaging; microwave tomography

Abstract—We assess the application of microwave tomography (MWT) for the detection of axillary lymph nodes (ALNs) in breast cancer patients. We numerically study the effects of limiting angular view in axillary MWT, as probes can only be placed on a limited arc around the axillary region. We also numerically study the possibility of increasing the amount of retrievable information by acquiring data in two consecutive steps, with a single antenna set in two different angular positions. We finally experimentally test axillary MWT on anthropomorphic phantoms with different levels of anatomical fidelity, and different ALN positions. Our MWT system (0.8-2.5GHz) employs 6 monopole antennas placed on a single transverse plane, facing the axillary region. The reconstruction algorithm implements the distorted Born iterative method, combined with the two-step iterative shrinkage/thresholding for the inversion (DBIM-TwIST). Our numerical results (i) highlight the challenges associated with the limited angular view, and (ii) show that performing two-step angular measurements enhance imaging results, suggesting that rotating the antenna set between consecutive measurements is an effective means to increase the retrievable information in ALN MWT. Our experimental results show that our MWT system can detect an ALN in different positions. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper to assess ALN MWT in a realistic 3D experimental scenario.