Abstract
Air pollution has been correlated to an increasing number of cases of human skin diseases in recent years. However, the investigation of human skin tissues has received only limited attention, to the point that there are not yet satisfactory modern detection technologies to accurately, noninvasively, and rapidly diagnose human skin at epidermis and dermis levels. In order to detect and analyze severe skin diseases such as melanoma, a finite element method (FEM) simulation study of the application of the laser-generated surface acoustic wave (LSAW) technique is developed. A three-layer human skin model is built, where LSAW’s are generated and propagated, and their effects in the skin medium with melanoma are analyzed. Frequency domain analysis is used as a main tool to investigate such issues as minimum detectable size of melanoma, filtering spectra from noise and from computational irregularities, as well as on how the FEM model meshing size and computational capabilities influence the accuracy of the results. Based on the aforementioned aspects, the analysis of the signals under the scrutiny of the phase velocity dispersion curve is verified to be a reliable, a sensitive, and a promising approach for detecting and characterizing melanoma in human skin.
Highlights
According to figures of the World Health Organization corresponding to global mortality statistics in 2012, the increasing level of environmental pollution has become a major environmental health risk in big cities worldwide, causing about 7 million deaths annually, nearly one in eight deaths, and twice of those in 2008
As far as we know, this paper presents the first finite element method (FEM) simulation investigation of the application of laser-generated surface acoustic wave (LSAW) spectroscopy to find and analyze skin cancer such as melanoma
In order to calculate the phase velocity and plot the dispersion curve, two signals containing the information of the vertical displacements of the simulated surface acoustic waves (SAW) in two different locations are needed
Summary
According to figures of the World Health Organization corresponding to global mortality statistics in 2012, the increasing level of environmental pollution has become a major environmental health risk in big cities worldwide, causing about 7 million deaths annually, nearly one in eight deaths, and twice of those in 2008. The LSAW technique uses pulses of laser beams to generate ultrasound waves by the action of a thermo-elastic effect in the surface of solid media, and uses contact or noncontact detection approaches to acquire acoustic waves propagated in the surface vicinity of the source, with the potential to characterize some mechanical and physical properties of surface tissues like skin.[6,7,8] When a pulse laser beam impinges on the skin, a part of the energy is scattered, but a significant part is converted into heat With this conversion process, elastic waves are mainly caused by local thermal expansion during temperature rise and spreading in the skin surface. Based on the analysis and discussion of the simulation results, the dispersion curve of LSAW is proposed to be a feasible tool to detect melanoma in skin
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