Techniques to Enhance Performance of Confocal Algorithm in Medical Microwave Imaging

Microwave confocal imaging is a promising technique that can be used in various biomedical applications, such as breast cancer or stroke detection. As a diagnostic tool, it can show any strong scatter, which can be an abnormality, within the imaged domain. While confocal imaging is fast and requires limited computational resources, it suffers from serious challenges. Most of those challenges come from the fact that confocal imaging is derived using the principles of far-field electromagnetic propagation in homogeneous media but applied in the near-field heterogeneous media of medical applications. This paper discusses the fundamentals of confocal imaging and explores techniques to enhance its performance. Full-wave electromagnetic simulations of real-life scenarios are used to support the investigation.