Wearable Array Antenna System for the Early Stage Detection of Breast Cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer has affected a large number of women all over the world. Every year, a million new cases are reported and the rate of acquisition continues to rise every year. The only key to combating and ensuring effective treatment is to catch it at early stage. X-ray mammography, computed tomography (CT), ultrasounds (US), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are commonly used breast cancer screening devices. So far as early cancer screening is concerned, these devices do not support towards early detection. Further it has also been observed that above mentioned devices often produce many drawbacks and side effects, such as painful scanning, ionizing radiation, and false-negative effects. On the other side, Microwave imaging techniques have become very popular to have early detection of breast cancer tumor. Due to the advancement and growth of medical science, antennas are needed to capture, diagnose, and provide quality medical care to patients. The proposed research work also provides a solution to this problem in the form of a flexible antenna. We have developed a novel wearable array antenna system to have early detection of breast cancer tumor. The flexible antennas have a slot loaded over the patch and copper ground plane as conducting material. A Rogers 5880 with a thickness of 0.13 mm and a dielectric constant of 2.2 is used to develop the antenna system. The co-axial feeding is selected for the proposed antenna operating at 2.4 GHz, with dimensions of 16 × 16 mm. The return loss of -25 dB at 2.4 GHz has been achieved. In addition, the flexible six-element antenna array has also been developed. Breast phantom has also been developed and Confocal Imaging techniques has been implemented on the phantom for the detection of the cancer tumor. Excellent results have been achieved using Confocal imaging technique.