Towards integrated measurements of dielectric tissue properties at microwave frequencies

The dielectric material properties of the underlying tissue is of great importance in many biomedical applications, such as microwave breast cancer detection, to enable high resolution imaging of malignant tissue. In contrast to existing methods that are based on Time-of-Flight measurements to estimate the relative permittivity, we propose a sensing technique that measures a frequency shift in the reflection measurements using existing and skin-coupled microwave antennas. This integrated approach, that does not require additional sensor technology, can be used to generate a patient specific map of relative permittivity and produces valuable a-priori information for reliable (non-invasive) diagnostics.