Skin Viscoelasticity Under Hypothermic Temperatures

Advances in electromagnetic technologies have led to recent developments in thermal treatments of diseased and injured skin tissue. These thermal treatment methods normally involve either a raising or lowering of temperature in targeted skin area to kill or thermally denaturize the necrotic cells but without affecting the surrounding, healthy tissue. It is proposed that a detailed understanding of the coupled biological-mechanical response under thermal loading will contribute to the design, characterization and optimization of strategies for delivering better treatments. Since it is technically very difficult to measure experimentally the bio-thermo-mechanical behaviour of skin tissue in physiological conditions, analytical and numerical simulations are used, where the quantification of the skin mechanical properties is an essential step towards building reliable computer simulations. So far, the mechanical properties of the skin tissue under normal physiological conditions have been studied experimentally a lot both in vivo and in vitro. However, little has been done on characterization of the mechanical properties of skin tissue under hypothermic conditions, which will be addressed in this study.