Fisher information analysis for two-dimensional microwave tomography

In this paper, a Fisher information analysis is employed to establish some important physical performance bounds in microwave tomography. As a canonical problem, the two-dimensional electromagnetic inverse problem of imaging a cylinder with isotropic dielectric losses is considered. A fixed resolution is analysed by introducing a finite basis, i.e., pixels representing the material properties. The corresponding Cramer-Rao bound for estimating the pixel values is computed based on a calculation of the sensitivity field which is obtained by differentiating the observed field with respect to the estimated parameter. An optimum trade-off between the accuracy and the resolution is defined based on the Cramer-Rao bound, and its application to assess a practical resolution limit in the inverse problem is discussed. Numerical examples are included to illustrate how the Fisher information analysis can be used to investigate the significance of measurement distance, operating frequency and losses in the canonical tomography set-up.