III.

Data Acquisition
Experiment setup:
Breast phantom is made of rubber and bacon. Rubber models the fatty tissues as
they have similar dielectric properties, while bacon models the tumor tissue, for the
same reasons above. We have two sets of antennas (transmitter and receiver)
connected by 16 cables to the detection mechanism.

Process:
The transmitter antennas are excited to send a signal, which is then reflected by the
phantom breast and captured with the receiver antennas. The Rx module amplifies
and samples the received signal. The reference voltage of the ADC in this
experiment were set as 330 mv and 690 mv respectively.

IV. Image Reconstruction

In the ideal case, detection is carried out using a tumor-free phantom breast as a
reference signal. This will subsequently be subtracted from the raw data. It is not
practical in clinical usage, however it suffices as a preliminary method to test the
overall performance of the system. Both ideal and average algorithms were used in
this section.
Case of the ideal artifact removal algorithm:
Offsets between the two experiments should be taken into consideration, these are
due to temperature changes and vibration due to motion. Therefore it is necessary
to align the sampled signal in the two experiments. The accuracy of the ADC causes
difficulties in recognizing the peak signal in some antenna pairs.
The 4 bit ADC failed to differentiate between the signals of some antenna pairs as
they were very weak. These signals were ignored, and where it was evident that
there was a peak signal they were chosen. To correct the offset signal, the following
signal adjustment procedure was carried out:
1. Find the first continuous peaks when a tumor is found. The average
peak time is then calculated.
2. Find the first continuous peaks when a tumor is not found. The
average peak time is calculated.
3. Calculate the offset between the above two signal peak times
4. Offset the reference signal to match the original target one, and set it
as the new reference signal.
The confocal imaging is applied to the subtracted signal to reconstruct an image of
the breast phantom. The algorithm basically adds the reflected signals coherently
and subtracts the noise signals incoherently, in order to identify the position of the
target. As the ADC is currently only 4-bits, it is sometimes not precise enough to

recover the tumor response. A more precise signal can be obtained through
increasing the measurement time and then averaging the signals.
Image reconstruction is firstly carried out using the ideal artifacts removal. By use of
the reference signals the breast image is reconstructed. The results show that the
estimated position of the target is almost the same as the targets real position. This
is evidence that increasing the measurement time and averaging increases the
signal accuracy. However the ideal artifact remover is impractical, thus the
averaging artifact removal algorithm is applied to the average signals.