Microwave breast imaging: 3-D forward scattering simulation.

Active microwave imaging (MWI) is emerging as a promising technique for the detection of biomedical anomalies such as breast cancer because of the high electrical contrasts between malignant tumors and normal tissue. Previously, we have developed fast two-dimensional forward and inverse scattering algorithms for MWI systems. In this paper, we report the full three-dimensional (3-D) forward scattering simulation in order to account for 3-D effects and to provide a fast solver in future 3-D nonlinear inverse scattering methods. The 3-D fast forward method is based on the stabilized biconjugate-gradient fast Fourier transform (BCGS-FFT) algorithm. The method has been validated for various MWI measurement scenarios. Using this fast simulation method, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for 3-D effects in MWI, and we compare numerical results with the measurements from an experimental prototype.