A slotted UWB monopole antenna with truncated ground plane for breast cancer detection

In the last decade, a new dawn for research on microwave imaging (MI) has been observed in the medical domain specially in the breast cancer diagnosis, since it offers many advantages over current imaging systems like computed tomography (CT), X-ray radiography etc. Microwave imaging system (MIS) provides a suitable platform for in-depth inspection of breast tissues. It helps in identification and localisation of morphological changes in these tissues. The emerging Ultrawideband (UWB) MI gives better results due to its non-ionizing signals which operate over the frequency ranging from hundreds of Megahertz (MHz) to tens of Gigahertz (GHz). In these systems, antennas play a significant role in establishing a sensor network. Hence, its optimization is very crucial because the device is placed at close proximity to the human body. In this paper, a miniaturised monopole patch antenna which operates at UWB frequency range with a microstrip feed line is proposed. The design is composed of a small rectangular patch with dimensions 0.17λ×0.25λ×0.02λ (where λ is wavelength calculated at lower operating frequency 4.8 GHz). It has four corner cuts and a centrally located square slot with a truncated ground-plane for achieving UWB properties. The proposed antenna has the measured fractional bandwidth of 141%(3.22-11.92GHz) with linearly increasing gain ranging from (1.4 to 6.43 dBi). The detailed time domain analysis is done to prove the efficacy of antenna for signal propagation. The advantage of proposed antenna is that it has low profile, compact size, easy to design which can be employed in MI breast cancer detection.