Surface Estimation for Microwave Imaging

Biomedical imaging and sensing applications in many scenarios demand accurate surface estimation from a sparse set of noisy measurements. These measurements may arise from a variety of sensing modalities, including laser or electromagnetic samples of an object's surface. We describe a state-of-the-art microwave imaging prototype that has sensors to acquire both microwave and laser measurements. The approach developed to translate sparse samples of the breast surface into an accurate estimate of the region of interest is detailed. To evaluate the efficacy of the method, laser and electromagnetic samples are acquired by sensors from three realistic breast models with varying sizes and shapes. A set of metrics is developed to assist with the investigation and demonstrate that the algorithm is able to accurately estimate the shape of a realistic breast phantom when only a sparse set of data are available. Moreover, the algorithm is robust to the presence of measurement noise, and is effective when applied to measurement scans of patients acquired with the prototype.