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Tissue expansion is a common technique in plastic and reconstructive surgery that grows skin in vivo for the correction of large cutaneous defects 1. Neumann, in 1957, was the first surgeon to document this procedure. He implanted a balloon below the skin of a patient and inflated it gradually over a period of several weeks to grow new tissue and resurface an ear 2. Skin, like most biological tissues, adapts to applied forces and deformations in order to reach mechanical homeostasis. When stretched beyond the physiological regime, skin grows 3,4. One of the central advantages of tissue expansion is the production of skin with proper vascularization and the same hair bearing, mechanical properties, color, and texture as the surrounding tissue 5.
After its introduction six decades ago, skin expansion has been widely adopted by plastic and reconstructive surgeons and is presently used to correct burns, large congenital defects, and for breast reconstruction after mastectomy 6,7. Yet, despite its widespread use, skin expansion procedures can lead to complications 8. This is partly due to the lack of sufficient quantitative evidence needed to understand the fundamental mechanobiology of the procedure and to guide the surgeon during preoperative planning 9,10. Key parameters in this technique are the filling rate, filling volume per inflation, the selection of the shape and size of the expander, and the placement of the device 11,12. Current preoperative planning relies largely on the physician's experience, resulting in a wide variety of arbitrary protocols that often differ greatly 13,14,15.
To address the current knowledge gaps, we present an experimental protocol to quantify expansion-induced deformation in a porcine animal model of tissue expansion. The protocol relies on the use of multi-view stereo (MVS) to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) geometries out of sequences of two-dimensional (2D) images with unknown camera positions. Employing splines, representation of smooth surfaces leads to the calculation of the corresponding deformation maps by means of an isogeometric (IGA) description. The analysis of the geometry is based on the theoretical framework of continuum mechanics of membranes having an explicit parameterization 16.
Characterizing physiologically relevant deformations of living materials over long periods of time still remains a challenging problem. Common strategies for imaging of biological tissues include stereoscopic digital image correlation, commercial motion capture systems with reflective markers, and biplane video fluoroscopy 17,18,19. However, these techniques require a restrictive experimental setup, are generally expensive, and have been primarily used for ex vivo or acute in vivo settings. Skin has the advantage of being a thin structure. Even though it consists of several layers, the dermis is largely responsible for the mechanical properties of the tissue and thus the surface deformation is of primary importance 20; reasonable kinematical assumptions can be made regarding the out of plane deformation 21,22. Moreover, skin is already exposed to the outside environment, making it possible to use conventional imaging tools to capture its geometry. Here we propose the use of MVS as an affordable and flexible approach to monitor in vivo deformations of skin over several weeks without interfering majorly with a tissue expansion protocol. MVS is a technique that extracts 3D representations of objects or scenes from a collection of 2D images with unknown camera angles 23. Only in the last three years, several commercial codes have appeared (see list of materials for examples). The high accuracy of the model reconstruction with MVS, with errors as low as 2% 24, makes this approach suitable for the kinematic characterization of skin in vivo over long periods of time.
To obtain the corresponding deformation maps of skin during tissue expansion, points between any two geometric configurations are matched. Conventionally, researchers in computational biomechanics have used finite element meshes and inverse analysis to retrieve the deformation map 25,26. The IGA approach employed here uses spline basis functions which offer several advantages for the analysis of thin membranes 27,28. Namely, the availability of high degree polynomials facilitates representations of smooth geometries even with very coarse meshes 29,30. Additionally, it is possible to fit the same underlying parameterization to all the surface patches, which circumvents the need for an inverse problem to account for non-matching discretizations.
The method described here opens new avenues to study skin mechanics in relevant in vivo settings over long periods of time. In addition, we are hopeful that our methodology is an enabling step towards the ultimate goal of developing computational tools for personalized treatment planning in the clinical setting.