Jürgen De Zaeytijd

Three-dimensional quantitative microwave imaging from measured data with multiplicative smoothing and value picking regularization

This paper presents reconstructions of four targets from the 3D Fresnel database. The electromagnetic inverse scattering problem is treated as a nonlinear optimization problem for the complex permittivity in an investigation domain. The goal of this paper is to explore the achievable reconstruction quality when such a quantitative inverse scattering approach is employed on real world measurements, using only single-frequency data. Two regularization techniques to reduce the ill-possedness of the inverse scattering problem are compared. The first one is a multiplicative smoothing regularization, applied directly to the cost function, which yields smoothed reconstructions of the homogeneous Fresnel targets without much experimentation to determine the regularization parameter. The second technique is the recently proposed value picking (VP) regularization which is particularly suited for the class of piecewise (quasi-)homogeneous targets, such as those of the Fresnel database. In contrast to edge-preserving regularization methods, VP regularization does not operate on the spatial distribution of permittivity values, but it clusters them around some reference values, the VP values, in the complex plane. These VP values are included in the cost function as auxiliary optimization variables and their number can be gradually increased using a stepwise relaxed VP regularization scheme. Both regularization strategies are incorporated in a Gauss–Newton minimization framework with line search. It is shown that the reconstruction quality using single-frequency Fresnel data is good when using multiplicative smoothing and even better when using the VP regularization. In particular, the completely blind reconstruction of the mystery target in the database provides us with a detailed quantitative image of a plausible object.

Three-dimensional quantitative microwave imaging of realistic numerical breast phantoms using Huber regularization

Breast tumor detection with microwaves is based on the difference in dielectric properties between normal and malignant tissues. The complex permittivity reconstruction of inhomogeneous dielectric biological tissues from microwave scattering is a nonlinear, ill-posed inverse problem. We proposed to use the Huber regularization in our previous work where some preliminary results for piecewise constant objects were shown. In this paper, we employ the Huber function as regularization in the even more challenging 3D piecewise continuous case of a realistic numerical breast phantom. The resulting reconstructions of complex permittivity profiles indicate potential for biomedical imaging.

A Subspace Preconditioned LSQR Gauss-Newton Method with a Constrained Line Search Path Applied to 3D Biomedical Microwave Imaging

Three contributions that can improve the performance of a Newton-type iterative quantitative microwave imaging algorithm in a biomedical context are proposed. (i) To speed up the iterative forward problem solution, we extrapolate the initial guess of the field from a few field solutions corresponding to previous source positions for the same complex permittivity (i.e., “marching on in source position”) as well as from a Born-type approximation that is computed from a field solution corresponding to one previous complex permittivity profile for the same source position. (ii) The regularized Gauss-Newton update system can be ill-conditioned; hence we propose to employ a two-level preconditioned iterative solution method. We apply the subspace preconditioned LSQR algorithm from Jacobsen et al. (2003) and we employ a 3D cosine basis. (iii) We propose a new constrained line search path in the Gauss-Newton optimization, which incorporates in a smooth manner lower and upper bounds on the object permittivity, such that these bounds never can be violated along the search path. Single-frequency reconstructions from bipolarized synthetic data are shown for various three-dimensional numerical biological phantoms, including a realistic breast phantom from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWCEM) online repository.