Tissue mimicking materials for breast phantoms using waste oil hardeners

Realistic breast phantoms are often required for supporting the development of microwave and mm-wave imaging systems for breast cancer detection. A number of phantoms have been proposed in the literature, but they are often realized using non-common or toxic materials, and characterized only for the microwave regime. Recently, mm-waves have been also proposed for screening purposes, especially for breast with a high fat content, to provide the resolution vital to detect early-stage cancer masses. Consequently, we proposed several recipes that can be used to create tissue-mimicking materials able to reflect the dielectric properties of different human breast tissues, from fat to neoplastic tissues. In this paper, we present new recipes specifically conceived to mimic up to 50 GHz the dielectric properties of very fat tissues, difficult to achieve otherwise. The involved materials are deionized water, sunflower oil, waste-oil hardener, and two different surfactants (lecithin and Polysorbate 80), all very cheap, easy-to-manage, not-toxic and common materials.