Contrast Enhanced Microwave Imaging via Magnetic Nanoparticles

Microwave imaging (MI) receives huge attention in the framework of breast cancer diagnosis. However, recent studies have shown that cancerous tissues exhibit electromagnetic features close to those of connective fibroglandular ones, so false alarms and lack of detection may occur. To overcome this drawback, we have recently proposed a MI approach exploiting magnetic nanoparticle as a contrast agent able to artificially induce a magnetic anomaly localized into the cancer. Key feature of our strategy is the adoption of a polarizing magnetic field to modulate the magnetic response of the magnetic anomaly and then the data collected in the microwave frequency range. Such a modulation is exploited to extract from the measured signal, which accounts for the overall probed electromagnetic scenario, the field scattered by the magnetic anomaly. Therefore, the microwave breast cancer imaging is formulated as the problem of retrieving a magnetic contrast embedded into a non magnetic scenario.