MECHANICAL SKIN QUALITIES: CONTRACTILITY AND TENSILITY, THEIR CORRELATION, HISTOLOGICAL BASIS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF FORECASTING

Abstract

Learning the process of changes in skin that occurs during plastic surgery is of great importance for the effective planning of plastic operations. According to biomechanics the human skin is a composite material with heterogeneous nonlinear anisotropic viscoelastic characteristics. This is associated with difficulties in building an effective model of soft tissues and skin. Most investigators consider dermis to be the determinative of mechanical properties of the full-thickness skin. And architectonics is the main reason of differences in mechanical behaviour of the skin. One of the methods of studying the skin properties is mechanical test, which is considered as functional biopsy, as its behavior is defined by its microstructural composition and organization. The aim of this study was to determine such features as contractility and tensile strength, their histological foundation and an opportunity to predict them. As we`ve found the features of interest in spite of being determined by the same microanatomical structures have a complicated nonlinear correlation and depend on different characteristics of connective tissue fibers.