Active microwave imaging for biomedical has been proposed, studied, and implemented to varying degrees by a plethora of worldwide institutions for the last 30 years. Much of the interest has been based on the fact that tissue dielectric properties embody important information about physiological state and function. Early efforts concentrated on techniques involving classic techniques such as diffraction imaging and the Born and Rytov approximations which ultimately proved too limited for the high degree of field scattering involved with electromagnetic fields. At a time of rapidly increasing computational power and speed, the electromagnetics field quickly adopted these capabilities for developing improved forward and inverse modeling tools. This was especially convenient in that hardware implementations could be rapidly simulated and validated without the considerable time and expense of fabrication and testing. The evolution of numerical capabilities has been considerable to the point where fully 3D software packages, both customized and commercial, can represent complex geometries in reasonable time frames with exquisite resolution.
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