Non-Uniform Antenna Array for Enhanced Medical Microwave Imaging

A non-uniform antenna array is proposed to enhance the accuracy of medical microwave imaging systems by increasing the amount of useful information captured about the imaged domain without increasing the number of antennas. These systems have so far been using uniform antenna arrays, which lead to highly correlated signals, limiting the amount of imaging information and adversely affecting diagnostic accuracy. In the proposed non-uniform antenna array method, the optimal number and positions of antennas are calculated with the aim of enhancing spatial diversity and reducing information redundancy. The mutual information coefficient is used as a metric to evaluate and minimize redundancy between received signals. A microwave head imaging system is used to verify the proposed approach. The results of the investigated scenarios show that using a non-uniform antenna configuration outperforms a uniform setup in imaging accuracy and clarity, when using the same number of antennas. Moreover, the reconstructed images demonstrate that using an optimized non-uniform antenna array with fewer elements can outperform a uniform array with more elements in terms of localization accuracy and image quality. The proposed approach improves imaging performance and reduces system complexity, cost, and power consumption, making it a practical solution for real-world biomedical imaging applications.