Three-Dimensional Near-Field Microwave Holography for Tissue Imaging

This paper reports the progress toward a fast and reliable microwave imaging setup for tissue imaging exploiting near-field holographic reconstruction. The setup consists of two wideband TEM horn antennas aligned along each other's boresight and performing a rectangular aperture raster scan. The tissue sensing is performed without coupling liquids. At each scanning position, wideband data is acquired. Then, novel holographic imaging algorithms are implemented to provide three-dimensional images of the inspected domain. In these new algorithms, the required incident field and Green's function are obtained from numerical simulations. They replace the plane (or spherical) wave assumption in the previous holographic methods and enable accurate near-field imaging results. Here, we prove that both the incident field and Green's function can be obtained from a single numerical simulation. This eliminates the need for optimization-based deblurring which was previously employed to remove the effect of realistic non-point-wise antennas.