Hardware accelerator for wearable and portable radar-based microwave breast imaging systems

This paper proposes a novel hardware accelerator for wearable and portable radar-based microwave breast imaging applications. The hardware accelerator is implemented on a low-cost and compact FPGA that is much cheaper than other accelerators developed in previous studies. The proposed hardware accelerator is demonstrated by using experimental tests with different configurations. Data was obtained from a wearable antenna array system and processed through microwave imaging in space-time (MIST) algorithm. The results from the proposed hardware accelerator show an improvement in experimental execution time that is 4 times faster than those obtained from computer-based methods. The fast execution times make the use of the proposed hardware accelerator suitable for real-time detection. In addition, the proposed hardware accelerator had the lowest power consumption among other similar accelerators developed in previous work, thus making it a safe and efficient system to be implemented in wearable microwave imaging systems. The use of a low-cost FPGA provides a promising method for hardware acceleration with existing microwave imaging systems. This research provides a foundation for future work to be developed in building a complete system that utilises low-cost and low requirement-based FPGAs that can be customized for portable and wearable breast cancer imaging applications.