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Keywords:
Breast, Experimental, Diagnostic procedure, Technology assessment, Cancer
Authors:
N. Ridley1, A. Iriarte2, L. Tsui2, C. Bore2, M. Shere2, I. Lyburn3, P. Bannister2; 1Swindon/UK, 2Bristol/UK, 3Cheltenham/UK
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2017/C-1855
Methods and materials
System description:
MARIA is a CE-marked radio-frequency (RF) medical imaging system comprising a patient bed,
a Scanning and Data Processing (SDP) unit which is located under the bed (see Figure 1) and a touch-screen console featuring a software user interface that controls both acquisition and review.
The SDP unit contains a hemispherical array of 60 RF antennae which encircle the breast such that uniform transmission and reception is achieved over 1770 bi-static paths and across 101 frequency bins.
The breast lies pendant in the array through a hole in the bed and one of a set of conformal ceramic inserts that are placed into the array are used to fit a range of breast sizes without the need for compression (see Figure 2).
A complete scan results in a dataset that records the dielectric properties of the breast.
Data is reconstructed as a 3D volume for review (see Figure 3) and further spectral analysis as described below.
Data collection:
Patients attending symptomatic clinics at 3 sites were identified by clinicians as having a palpable lump.
Following informed consent eligible patients underwent this prone imaging technique.
Bilateral radiofrequency data was recorded along with clinical information and other imaging studies including ultrasound and/ or mammography and,
when relevant,
core biopsy results to determine lesion type [Ethics approval (Yorkshire & The Humber and South Yorkshire REC 15/YH/0084,
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02493595)].
The RF responses of 48 studies exhibiting unifocal lesions with a histological diagnosis of malignant (Ca) or benign (Fibroadenoma (Fa) and Cyst (Cy)) were recorded in the 3 to 8 GHz range.
In order to characterize the response of each study with a miminum number of parameters,
the 3 to 8 GHz range has been split into three bands: the low frequency band (from 3 to 4.6 GHz),
the medium frequency band (from 4.7 to 6.3 GHz) and the high frequency band (from 6.4 to 8.9 GHz).
Then the average magnitude response for each band has been computed and labelled as R,G,B (for low,
medium and high frequencies,
respectively). The differences between the RF properties of the malignant and benign lesions have been analysed trough a set of scatter plots of different combinations of R,G,B values.