Extracting the elasticity of the human skin in microscale and in-vivo from atomic force microscopy experiments using viscoelastic models

Abstract

Detecting mechanical properties of the intact skin in-vivo leads to a novel quantitative method to diagnose skin diseases and to monitor skin conditions in clinical settings. Current research and clinical methods that detect skin mechanics have major limitations. The in-vitro experiments are done in non-physiological conditions and in-vivo clinical methods measurer unwanted mechanics of underneath fat and muscle tissues but report the measurement as skin mechanics. An ideal skin mechanics should be captured at skin scale (i.e., micron-scale) and in-vivo. However, extreme challenges of capturing the in-vivo skin mechanics in micron-scale including skin motion due to heart beep, breathing and movement of the subject, has hindered measurement of skin mechanics in-vivo.

This study for the first time captures micro-scale mechanics (elasticity and viscoelasticity) of top layers of skin (i.e., the stratum corneum (SC) and stratum granulosum (SG)) in-vivo. In this study, the relevant literature is reviewed and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) was used to capture force-indentation curves on the fingertip skin of four human subjects at a high indentation speed of 40 $\mu m/s.$ The skin of the same subject were tested in-vitro at 10 different indentation speeds ranging from 0.125 to 40 $\mu m/s$ by AFM. This study extracts the in-vivo elasticity of SC and SG by detecting time-dependency of tested tissue using a fractional viscoelastic standard linear model developed for indentation. The in-vivo elasticity of SC and SG were smaller in females and in-vitro elasticity were higher than that of in-vivo results. The results were consistent with previous observations.

Keywords:

• Human skin mechanics
• epidermis
• stratum corneum
• stratum granulosum
• fractional standard linear solid model
• mechanical properties
• elasticity
• viscoelastic model
• viscoelasticity
• in-vivo skin mechanics
• atomic force microscopy
• in-vivo AFM

Acknowledgment

We sincerely thank the human subjects for participating in the experiments. This study was performed at the Biomechanics laboratory in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tehran.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).