Adhesion monitoring of skin grafts by photoacoustic measurement: experiment using rat allograft models

Abstract

Adhesion monitoring of grafted skins is very important in successful treatment of severe burns and traumas. However, current diagnosis of skin grafting is usually done by visual observation, which is not reliable and gives no quantitative information on the skin graft adhesion. When the grafted skin adheres well, neovascularities will be generated in the grafted skin tissue, and therefore adhesion may be monitored by detecting the neovascularities. In this study, we attempted to measure photoacoustic signals originate from the neovascularities by irradiating the grafted skins with 532-nm nanosecond light pulses in rat autograft and allograft models. The measurement showed that immediately after skin grafting, photoacoustic signal originate from the blood in the dermis was negligibly small, while 6 - 24 hours after skin grafting, signal was observed from the dermis in the graft. We did not observe a significant difference between the signals from the autograft and the allograft models. These results indicate that neovascularization would take place within 6 hours after skin grafting, and the rejection reaction would make little effect on adhesion within early hours after grafting.