Frequency Domain Skin Artifact Removal Method for Ultra-Wideband Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract—Using ultra-wide band (UWB) microwave pulse for breast cancer detection has been greatly investigated recently since it does not expose the patient to any harmful radiation and the implementation is relatively cheaper than other methods such as MRI or X-ray. An issue in UWB imaging of breast cancer is the strong backscatter from the breast skin which is in orders of magnitude larger than the pulse backscattered from the tumor and should be eliminated before processing the signal for the tumor detection and imaging. At present no existing method can effectively remove this artifact without introducing corruption to the tumor signature. In this paper, a novel method to eliminate this artifact is proposed which employs a frequency domain model to isolate and remove skin related information from the signal. This method is compared with the existing methods of the skin artifact removal in different scenarios. The results show that the new method can overcome the shortcomings of the previous methods and improve the detection of the tumor in the sense of the tumor to clutter response ratio. 1.