Abstract
Nowadays, laser therapy is a common method for treating various dermatological troubles such as acne and wrinkles because of its efficient and immediate skin enhancement. Although laser treatment has become a routine procedure in medical and cosmetic fields, the prevention of side-effects, such as hyperpigmentation, redness and burning, still remains a critical issue that needs to be addressed. In order to reduce the side-effects while attaining efficient therapeutic outcomes, it is essential to understand the light-skin interaction through evaluation of physiological changes before and after laser therapy. In this study, we introduce a quantitative tissue monitoring method based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) for the evaluation of tissue regeneration after laser irradiation. To create a skin injury model, we applied a fractional CO2 laser on a customized engineered skin model, which is analogous to human skin in terms of its basic biological function and morphology. The irradiated region in the skin was then imaged by a high-speed OCT system, and its morphologic changes were analyzed by automatic segmentation software. Volumetric OCT images in the laser treated area clearly visualized the wound healing progress at different time points and provided comprehensive information which cannot be acquired through conventional monitoring methods. The results showed that the laser wound in engineered skins was mostly recovered from within 1~2 days with a fast recovery time in the vertical direction. However, the entire recovery period varied widely depending on laser doses and skin type. Our results also indicated that OCT-guided laser therapy would be a very promising protocol for optimizing laser treatment for skin therapy.
Highlights
As laser technology is advanced, laser therapy has become a common way of treating various dermatological conditions such as wrinkles, melasma, and lentigo that are induced by aging [1, 2]
The recovery process of laser treated skin was monitored by optical coherence tomography (OCT) and compared to corresponding histology and microscopic images over time
Considering the morphological change of a segmented OCT image, we found that the recovery process of the laser irradiated zone is more active in the horizontal direction than in the vertical direction
Summary
As laser technology is advanced, laser therapy has become a common way of treating various dermatological conditions such as wrinkles, melasma, and lentigo that are induced by aging [1, 2]. In order to study wound healing processes in laser irradiated tissue, various monitoring methods have been tried. Histology is still the golden standard for investigating tissue structure in the biological and medical field, but it has inherent limitations when applied to dynamic studies due to its destructive treatment of specimens. Optical imaging techniques, including reflectance confocal microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, and second harmonic microscopy, have been considered as promising tools for investigating structural change of tissue. Even though most microscopic techniques provide high-contrast, and cellular resolution imaging, there still remains some critical restriction in monitoring laser irradiated tissue regions due to its shallow penetration depth and narrow field of view. Considering that the depth of laser treated regions is more than 1 mm, most optical imaging technologies are beyond deep tissue imaging
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