Portable Microwave-Acoustic Coaxial Thermoacoustic Probe With Miniaturized Vivaldi Antennas for Breast Tumor Screening

Microwave-induced thermoacoustic (TA) imaging (MTAI), which exploits dielectric contrasts to provide images with high contrast and spatial resolution, holds the potential to serve as an additional means of clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, conventional MTAI usually uses large and heavy metal antennas to radiate pulsed microwaves, making it challenging to image different target areas flexibly. In this work, we presented the design and evaluation of a portable microwave-acoustic coaxial TA probe (51 mm × 63 mm × 138 mm) that can flexibly image the region of interest. The TA probe contains two miniaturized symmetrically distributed Vivaldi antennas (7.5 g) and a 128-element linear ultrasonic transducer. By adjusting the geometry of the antennas and the ultrasonic transducer, the TA probe's acoustic field and microwave field can be designed to be coaxial, which helps achieve homogeneous microwave illumination and high-sensitivity ultrasonic detection. The practical feasibility of the proposed probe was tested on an in vitro ewe breast and a healthy volunteer. The results demonstrate that the MTAI system with the proposed TA probe can visualize the anatomical structure of the breast tumor in ewe breast and a healthy volunteer breast with resolutions in hundreds of microns (transverse: 910 μm, axial: 780 μm) and an excellent signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained in deep adipose tissue (10 dB in 6 cm fat). The miniaturized portable TA probe takes a solid step forward in translating MTAI technology to clinical breast tumor diagnosis.