Improving Diffraction Tomography for Microwave Imaging

Tomography refers to the cross-sectional imaging of an object from either transmission or reflection data collected by illuminating the object from many different directions. The impact of this technique in diagnostic medicine has been revolutionary, since it has enabled doctors to view internal organs with unprecedented precision and safety to the patient. The first medical application utilized x-rays for forming images of tissues based on their x-ray attenuation coefficient. More recently, however, medical imaging has also been successfully accomplished with radioisotopes, ultrasound and magnetic resonance; the imaged parameter being different in each case. But, when an object is illuminated with a diffracting source; as is the case with ultrasound and microwaves, the wave field is scattered in practically all directions. In these cases, there is the problem of lack of efficient algorithms to reconstruct a high-quality image. To overcome this problem, one approach is to use diffraction tomography, which is applicable to microwave imaging of biological bodies. The proposed research aims at describing how to apply the theory to actual problems in medical imaging and other fields. Finally, compare some of reconstruction examples of permittivity and conductivity with our simulation sources.

Keywords:

Diffraction tomography , Microwave Imaging , Filtered backpropagation