Chronic skin wounds are a tremendous clinical problem, and our understanding of them has been limited by a lack of established tools and biomarkers sensitive to different wound features. Using label-free two-photon excited fluorescence, second harmonic generation, and coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy, we demonstrate the ability to monitor skin wounds in vivo over 10 days. Specifically, differences in skin wound epithelial metabolism were identified among aged, diabetic, and young mice. Recent work involving automated wound segmentation through convolutional neural networks indicate an ability to provide rapid quantitative readouts of different aspects of wound structure and function.
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