Microwave Dielectric Contrast Imaging in a Magnetic Resonant Environment and the Effect of using Magnetic Resonant Spatial Information in Image Reconstruction

Microwave Tomography (MT) can determine the permittivity and conductivity of a volume of interest; it has been shown that a contrast exists between these electrical properties in healthy and malignant tissues, and MT can be used to discern the dielectric contrast image of these tissues by recovering their electrical property values. Simulation and phantom experiments of objects with known spatial locations have shown that using boundary information derived from internal structures in the imaged volume greatly increases the accuracy of the recovered property values. In practice this spatial information, which will be used for reconstructing the tissue's electrical property images, must be determined with high enough resolution to segment boundary regions and internal structures of interest. This experiment investigates the use of Magnetic Resonant Imaging (MRI) in obtaining the desired spatial information used in mesh generation for image reconstruction and provides microwave image results comparing electrical properties recovered with and without this prior spatial information.