Monitoring Skin Trauma Healing in Mice Using Second-Harmonic Generation Combined with Optical Coherence Tomography

In the 2017 study, researchers used Second-Harmonic Generation (SHG) and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) to monitor skin wound healing in mice. They observed the wounds at various stages of healing (days 3, 5, 7, 14, 21, and 28) and found that SHG could detect collagen accumulation and maturation, while OCT measured changes in the wound's signal and attenuation coefficient. The study showed a strong correlation between wound closure percentage, SHG intensity of collagen, and the attenuation coefficient, with correlation coefficients of 0.944, 0.9776, and 0.9354, respectively. The combination of SHG and OCT provided detailed structural and optical information about the healing process, suggesting that these methods could potentially replace traditional wound healing indicators. The study involved 5 independent experiments with statistical significance set at P<0.05 and was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.