Non-invasive Monitoring of Wound Healing Using Oct

In this chapter we first describe the use of PSOCT imaging of tissues resected from Staphylococcus aureus infected and uninfected wounds, at different healing times, to assess the morphological changes and collagen remodeling at various stages of wound healing. Next we describe the use of a time domain real time (~ 8 frames/s) OCT set up for monitoring the healing of wounds non-invasively without sacrificing the animal. These measurements showed that compared to the uninfected wounds, the infected wounds had prominent edematic regions which leads to a significant delay in re-epithelization and collagen remodeling phases of wound healing. The OCT measurements were found to be consistent with the corresponding histological measurements demonstrating the potential of OCT for non-invasive monitoring of the progression of wound healing.