Conventional mammography for cancer detection involves ionizing radiation and tissue compression. Patient dissatisfaction with this procedure has motivated researchers to explore alternative cancer detection techniques. One such promising technique is microwave imaging (MI), which is based on the contrast between the dielectric properties of healthy tissue and malignant tumors.

Active MI has two well-known approaches, microwave tomography (MT) and radar‐based microwave imaging (RMI). The goal in MT is to create a map of the electrical properties of the tissue inferring the location of tumors, whereas in RMI, the objective is to produce a map of microwave scattering resulting from the contrast in dielectric properties of the different regions of the tissue.

The advantages of RMI over MT are its simplicity and signal processing robustness. In addition, using ultra‐wideband (UWB) signals in RMI also provides a high spatial resolution imaging. However, RMI is only possible using UWB signals, which is problematic in dispersive media such as tissue. The dielectric properties change over the UWB frequencies, and thus the speed of the microwave signals vary through the medium resulting in difficulties in the beamforming algorithm. Work has included signal processing, clutter reduction, antenna coupling and design.