An encoder–decoder and modified U‐Net network for microwave imaging of stroke.

Microwave imaging has been widely used in stroke diagnosis as a non‐invasive, ionizing radiation‐free imaging method. However, the electromagnetic inverse scattering problems of microwave imaging are nonlinear and ill‐posed. To further improve the accuracy of microwave imaging algorithms to identify and reconstruct stroke regions. A novel Encoder‐Decoder and Modified U‐Net (ED‐MUNET) network for microwave imaging of stroke is proposed. The newly proposed ED‐MUNET method accomplishes the initial imaging from scattered data to stroke images through an encoder–decoder in the first step. In the second step, the feature information of the reconstructed image is extracted through the modified U‐Net network, and the reconstruction from the rough stroke image to the high‐resolution image is realized. The second step avoids black‐box operations and improves image accuracy. ED‐MUNET has fewer artifacts, the relative reconstruction error is less than 0.05, and the reconstructed images are clearer, according to the comparative experiments with other networks. The experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed method for reconstructing stroke images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]