Plasma treatment effect on angiogenesis in wound healing process evaluated in vivo using angiographic optical coherence tomography

Non-thermalatmospheric pressure plasma holds promise for promoting wound healing. However, plasma-induced angiogenesis, which is important to better understand the underlying physics ofplasma treatment effect on wound healing, remains largely unknown. We therefore evaluated the effect of non-thermalplasma on angiogenesis during wound healing through longitudinal monitoring over 30 days using non-invasive angiographicoptical coherence tomographyimagingin vivo. We demonstrate that the plasma-treated vascular wound area of mouse ear was noticeably decreased as compared to that of control during the early days in the wound healing process. We also observed that the vascular area density was increased in theplasma affected region near the wound as compared to theplasma unaffected region. The difference in the vascular wound area and the vascular area density peaked around day 3. This indicates that theplasma treatment induced additional angiogenic effects in the wound healing process especially during the early days. This non-invasive optical angiographic approach forin vivo time-lapseimaging provides further insights into elucidating plasma-induced angiogenesis in the wound healing process and its application in the biomedicalplasma evaluation.

Source: Applied Physics Letters - December 6, 2016 Category: Physics Authors: D. W. Kim, T. J. Park, S. J. Jang, S. J. You and W. Y. Oh Source Type: research