Microwave-Induced Thermoacoustics: Assisting Microwave Tomography

Abstract

One of the applications of microwave tomography, which recovers the dielectric profiles based on the scattered-field data, is the detection of breast cancers. Here, we propose a new method, which aims to collect thermoacoustic signals generated during the period of microwave illumination, and use them for construction of the finite-element mesh for microwave tomography. Our preliminary two-dimensional study carefully links the physical processes that underlies this hybrid detection approach.