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Development of a portable reflectance confocal microscope and its application in the noninvasive in vivo evaluation of mesenchymal stem cell-promoted cutaneous wound healing

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Abstract

The process of wound healing is routinely evaluated by histological evaluation in the clinic, which may cause scarring and secondary injury. Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) represents a noninvasive, real-time imaging technique that allows in vivo evaluation of the skin. Traditional RCM was wide-probe-based, which limited its application on uneven and covered skin. In this study, we report the development of a portable reflectance confocal microscope (PRCM) in which all components were assembled in a handheld shell. Although the size and weight of the PRCM were reduced based on the use of a microelectromechanical system, the resolution was kept at 0.91 µm, and the field of view of the system was 343 μm×532 μm. When used in vivo, the PRCM was able to visualize cellular and nuclear morphology for both mouse and human skin. PRCM evaluations were then performed on wounds after topically applied mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) or saline treatment. The PRCM allowed visualization of the formation of collagen bundles, re-epithelization from the wound edge to the wound bed, and hair follicle regeneration, which were consistent with histological evaluations. Therefore, we offer new insights into monitoring the effects of topically applied MSCs on the process of wound healing by using PRCM. This study illustrates that the newly developed PRCM represents a promising device for real-time, noninvasive monitoring of the dynamic process of wound healing, which demonstrates its potential to diagnose, monitor, or predict disease in clinical wound therapy.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2021YFA1101100), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA16020807), the Major Innovative Research Team of Suzhou, China (No. ZXT2019007), Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (SIBET) and Jilin City Science and Technology Cooperation Project (No. E0550104), Science and Technology Innovation Talents in Universities of Henan Province and Doctor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province in the year of 2020.

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  1. Lixing Zhang and Xin Miao have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (SIBET), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, 215163, China

    Lixing Zhang, Xin Miao, Meijia Wang, Aihua Shi, Jingwen Wang, Yunhai Zhang, Jingzhong Zhang & Shuang Yu

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medical Imaging, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, 221004, China

    Jingzhong Zhang & Shuang Yu

  3. Zhengzhou Zhongke Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology Affiliated with SIBET, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

    Lixing Zhang, Jingzhong Zhang & Shuang Yu

  4. School of Biomedical Engineering (Suzhou), Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Xin Miao

  5. School of Radiation Medicine and Protection, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Zhonglin Ma

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  1. Lixing Zhang
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Contributions

LXZ and XM contributed to conceptualization; LXZ, MJW and JWW contributed to methodology; AHS and YHZ contributed to investigation; LXZ contributed to writing—original draft; all authors contributed to writing—review and editing; LXZ, SY and JZZ contributed to funding acquisition; YHZ contributed to resources; SY and JZZ contributed to supervision.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jingzhong Zhang or Shuang Yu.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. All experimental protocols involving animals were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and followed the procedure for Animal Experimental Ethical Inspection of Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIBET, CAS[2018-A21]). All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. Informed consent was obtained from all patients and volunteers for being included in the study. All experimental protocols involving human samples were approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (2019-136).

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Zhang, L., Miao, X., Wang, M. et al. Development of a portable reflectance confocal microscope and its application in the noninvasive in vivo evaluation of mesenchymal stem cell-promoted cutaneous wound healing. Bio-des. Manuf. 6, 268–283 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42242-022-00223-1

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