Experiment and simulation of microwave detection using IQ demodulation method for breast tumor screening

Breast cancer has become the most diagnosed cancer in the world. Microwave detection the breast tumor is attractive due to its high dielectric property contrast between different tissues of tumor. In this paper, we proposed an In-phase-Quadrature (IQ) demodulation-based method to detect the breast tumor with microwave at a frequency of 1.3 GHz. The microwave detection system consists of two signal generators, 12 transmitting/receiving antennas, two talent switches, a phantom and an IQ-Mixer. The amplitude information at the receiving antennas can be obtained by analyzing the difference frequency signals generated with two microwave signal generators. We also use the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for simulation verification, which can simulate the propagation of the electromagnetic wave. Through experiments and simulations of microwave hardware system and FDTD method, it can be proved that the results are consistent. The experimental and simulation results show that when the tumor phantom diameter decreases or its depth from the receiving antenna increases, whether there is a tumor phantom can be clearly distinguished. Moreover, we also explore the effects of different tumor phantom locations on the receiving antennas. The results show that it is feasible to detect the breast tumor with the IQ demodulation method based on microwave.