Optical coherence tomography investigation of growth cycles of engineered skin tissue

Engineered skin tissues are widely used in dermatological, pharmacological and toxicological studies and as autologous transplants in wound healing. Due to the high demand for artificial skin equivalents, there is a need for an automation of the manual production process to achieve a high-grade product. Thus, non-invasive monitoring of engineered tissue during the growth cycles is of major significance to understand and consequently improve the growth characteristics of in vitro tissue. Prior to the framework of the automation of artificial humanoid 3d-skin tissue engineering, optimal growth parameters need to be determined. The successful engineering of humanoid tissue is strongly coupled to the composition and structure of the upper epidermal and dermal skin layers. The layers are based on primary humanoid keratinocytes and a collagen - fibroblasts matrix. We applied optical coherence tomography as tissue imaging technology, which offers great potential to detect and characterize the differentiation processes of engineered skin. OCT provides a high resolution in the micron range with an imaging depth of about 1.5mm in semitransparent tissue. Due to a high quality signal to noise ratio, even small changes in signal at the boundary of the skin layers are detectable. In a study, OCT tomograms were taken after each production step of the skin equivalents and compared to the images of histologies.