In vivo time-series monitoring of dermal collagen fiber during skin burn healing using second-harmonic-generation microscopy

Abstract

Burn healing is a process to repair thermally damaged tissues. Although burn healing has many aspects, it is common for dynamics of collagen fiber to be closely related with burn healing. If such healing process can be visualized from the viewpoint of the collagen dynamics, one may obtain new findings regarding biological repairing mechanisms in the healing process. In this paper, we applied second-harmonic-generation microscopy for in vivo imaging of the healing process in animal skin burn and successfully visualized the decomposition, production, and growth of renewal collagen fibers as a series of time-lapse images in the same subject.