Wound healing and its imaging

Wound healing is essential to all animals for survival and is a highly conserved process. Under normal circumstances, healing in the skin progresses through a series of overlapping events: hemostasis, inflammation, granulation tissue formation, re-epithelialization, and then tissue remodeling. This chapter looks at the basics of the normal wound healing process and some of the more common pathologies related to the process. It examines some of the modalities that can be used to image the wound healing process, from the macroscopic approach to the microscopic subcellular techniques. These include macroscopic digital imaging, hyperspectral and multispectral Imaging, near-infrared spectroscopy, Raman imaging, confocal microscopy, and multiphoton imaging and second harmonics. The future for wound care treatment will benefit enormously from the development of novel imaging approaches to advise healthcare workers on whether or not a wound is healing.