A small ultra-wideband (UWB) patch antenna for microwave breast imaging (MWI) applications is shown off in this paper. However, to improve the antenna performance relating to the bandwidth (BW), the radiating element of the suggested antenna is modified by adding slits in the patch as well as the ground plane. The proposed prototype has a relatively small size of 20 × 19 × 1.6 mm3 and it accomplishes a return loss below −10 dB (S11< −10 dB) at an overall BW of 7 GHz (4–11 GHz) with more than 3 dBi realized gain. The antenna is designed and simulated by using a finite integration technique-based simulator. In this way, the characteristics of the fabricated antenna are measured to examine the antenna performance. Indeed, the fidelity factor of face-to-face (FtF) and side-by-side (SbS) scenarios are also noticed for the same frequency range. In the final analysis, a simulation model of the antennas, that operate as a transceiver, and a breast phantom model with tumor sample is proposed for detecting cancerous tumor cells within the breast. Hence, the proposed approach is suitable for UWB based MWI applications in tumor cell detection.