Monitoring treatment response in a murine model of systemic sclerosis with optical coherence elastography

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Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) is a chronic disease of autoimmune etiology that causes vasomotor disturbance, fibrosis, and atrophy of skin, underlying tissue, muscles, and internal organs. It manifests in about 30 people per million every year, and there are an estimated three million cases worldwide. Currently, SSc is assessed using the modified Rodnan Skin Score (mRSS), which is a manual palpation test on 17 sites that requires extensive physician training and experience for accurate assessments. Unfortunately, mRSS has very high inter-observer variability and is subjective. Optical coherence elastography (OCE) is a well-established technique for assessing the mechanical properties of tissues with sub-millimeter spatial resolution. In this work, OCE was used to non-invasively assess the mechanical properties of mouse skin in vivo. OCE measurements were performed on 3 groups of mice, (1) control group that was injected with PBS, (2) SSc group that was injected with bleomycin (BLM) to induce SSc, and (3) treatment group that was first injected with BLM and then injected with imatinib, which is postulated to reduce disease in SSc. The wave speed in BLM-SSc skin was significantly higher than that of normal skin (p<0.05). The wave speed in murine skin in the treatment group was slightly lower as compared to the BLM-SSc skin, but the difference was not significant. These results demonstrate the ability of OCE to monitor SSc disease and treatment response and support further evaluation of this platform in monitoring SSc in the clinic.