Study of microwave tomography measurement setup configurations for breast cancer detection based on breast compression

Microwave tomography (MT) measurement setups for different configurations based on breast compression are compared to classical circular measurement setups. Configurations based on compression allow measuring the evanescent component of the scattered field and lead to a compact measurement setup that allows direct image comparison with a standard mammography system. The different configurations are compared based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the radiation operator for a 2D TM case. This analysis allows determining under which conditions the image quality obtained from the reconstructions can be enhanced. These findings are confirmed by a series of reconstructions of breast phantoms based on synthetic data obtained at a single frequency of operation.