paMELA - Photoacoustic Melanoma Detector Design for Real-Time Imaging of Melanin with 18 db SNR and 10 mu m Precision

This article presents the complete photon-to-bit cross-domain model of a photoacoustic melanoma detector (paMELA), consisting of a pulsed laser, a multichannel acoustic sensor, an analog front-end and a DSP stage for the implementation of an acoustic imaging algorithm. The photoacoustic effect can be exploited to obtain complementary information on a suspected melanoma with respect to classical dermatoscopic techniques. By modelling the physical phenomena (generation and propagation of the acoustic signal), electromechanical process (pressure-voltage transduction by the acoustic sensor), the analog and digital signal processing, it is possible to evaluate the impact of each stage on the quality of the final image. Finally, the simulation results of paMELA allow to evaluate the performance of the detector in terms of localization precision and signalto-noise ratio, using both a single point-like source and a complete biological tissue phantom with different sources sizes and features, obtaining 18 dB of SNR and 10 mu m of precision in is acquisition.