Making breast cancer diagnosis accessible and affordable

A new paper in which senior faculty of School of Engineering and Technology, Apeejay Stya University are co-authors, could provide a ray of hope to thousands of women in rural India, who are reticent about going out of their homes for frequent physical examinations for breast cancer screenings. The paper, titled, ‘Detection of Breast Cancer in Women with High Mammographic Density’ has been published in the hallowed International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, Inderscience and has contributions from Dean and Professor Moin Uddin and Professor Parikshit Vasisht of the School of Engineering and Technology, Apeejay Stya University. The other authors of the paper include Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Jamia Millia Islamia faculty members Amber Khan and Mainuddin.

The Journal, with the acronym IJMEI, is indexed in Scopus (Elsevier). IJMEI includes authoritative review papers, the reporting of original research, and evaluation reports of new/existing techniques and devices. Each issue also contains a comprehensive information service.

Says Professor MoinUddin, Professor and Dean, School of Engineering and Technology, Apeejay Stya University: “India’s health care infrastructure is the second worst among the index countries and needs a major policy reform. A large section of the rural population does not gain access to effective and affordable treatment.  A human body or an organ is regarded as a hostile and complex environment for microwave signals. Antenna is considered as the most critical, valuable component of a wireless body area network (WBAN) and microwave imaging system. Microwaves in the frequency band 300 MHz to 300 GHz are classified as non-ionising radiation signals. The wavelength of EM waves ranging from 1 m to 1 mm is highly suggested for screening human organs. Recently, microwave-based methods have been used for early detection of breast cancer especially in patients having dense breasts with quite small (0.5 mm–2 mm) size of tumour. The above electromagnetic band has approximately 1,000,000 cells deep penetration and provides high resolution of captured images of small cancer cells.”
Adds Professor Parikshit Vasisht of the School of Engineering and Technology, Apeejay Stya University, “IJMEI promotes an understanding of the structural/functional aspects of disease mechanisms and the application of technology towards the treatment/management of such diseases. It seeks to promote interdisciplinary collaboration between those interested in the theoretical and clinical aspects of medicine and to foster the application of computers and mathematics to problems arising from medical sciences.”

Attractive features of Ultra-WideBand Technology (UWB)

Application of Ultra-wideband technology is considered a potential, powerful and promising system for screening small size cancers in dense breasts. Some attractive features of UWB engineering are:

• Short time period pulses (sub nano-second)
• Deep penetration
• High precision of detecting small size cancer in dense breast
• Low electromagnetic radiation (non-ionizing)
• Non-invasive
• Biomedical compatibility
• Better resolution
• High data rate
• Low BER
• Small size antenna and other components
• High sensitivity
• Low specificity
• Simple network
• Low cost and reduction of complexity

The abstract of the paper is as follows: “For early detection of breast cancer among women having dense mammographic densities, one of the critical and valuable components of an accurate, effective and compact, involving minimum risk – Microwave Imaging system for early breast cancer detection is an Ultra Wideband (UWB) antenna. A novel, compact elliptical UWB microwave antenna is presented in this research article that might be suitable for early breast cancer detection. The antenna structure consists of a micro-strip line feeding mechanism. The simulation of antenna structure is carried out using HFSS13 FEM based EM software. The simulation results yield a better UWB response. The antenna configuration consists of an ordinary radiating patch, a feed line and defective ground structure with curved edges which provide a wide practical fractional bandwidth of more than 156% in the 1.52 – 12.50 GHz band. The simple travelling wave structure of the elliptical patch displays good quality omnidirectional radiation patterns even at higher frequencies. A significant performance factor of the proposed antenna is its ability to provide sufficient gain level for short distance communication. The proposed antenna structure has an overall small dimension. Thus, the proposed antenna is a strong candidate for design and development of microwave imaging system for early detection of breast cancer among women with dense mammographic densities.”

For further details of the paper, click at the inderscience site link below: 
https://www.inderscience.com/info/ingeneral/forthcoming.php?jcode=ijmei#89391