Investigation of human skin using pulse-echo ultrasonic technique: review and development

Abstract

Application of ultrasonic techniques provides non-invasive investigation of a lesion and the possibility to analyze certain aspects of the skin that are inaccessible to the eye of dermatologist. For diagnostic purposes, ultrasound examination makes it possible to recognize lesions causing morphological changes in structure of skin, to localize lesions and their extent, and to measure their thickness and density.
During the literature review it was defined, that an ultrasonic transducer with at least 20 MHz should be applied for effective early stage diagnosis of melanoma. The structure of the skin imaging system including the high frequency ultrasonic data acquisition unit combined with the excitation/reception circuit, mechanics for linear scanning, focused transducer, electronics for scanning control and electronics for estimation of spatial positions has been proposed.