Study of Correlation Coefficient for Breast Tumor Detection in Microwave Tomography

In microwave tomography, it is necessary to increase the amount of diverse observation data for accurate image reconstruction of the dielectric properties of the imaging area. The multi-polarization method has been proposed as a suitable technique for the acquisition of a variety of observation data. While the effectiveness of employing multi-polarization to reconstruct images has been confirmed, the physical considerations related to image reconstruction have not been investigated. In this paper, a compact-sized imaging sensor using multi-polarization for breast cancer detection is presented. An analysis of the correlation coefficient of the received data of adjacent antennas was performed to interpret the imaging results. Numerical simulation results demonstrated that multi-polarization can reconstruct images better compared to single polarizations owing to its low correlation coefficient and condition number.