ABSTRACT
Bioengineering applications are becoming commonplace in many fields of medicine, including dermatology. The assessment of skin contours may be carried out to diagnose, to determine treatment efficacy, or to support pathophysiological experimentation. Many experimental methods have been used to study skin surface contours. Initially, only simple magnification methods were used; they were followed by the analysis of replicas under the scanning electron microscope (1). Later, other quantitative measurement techniques such as stylus profilometry, which was developed for surface metrological studies, were adopted to measure skin surface contours (2,3). Nevertheless, the stylus profilometer had limitations when it came to determining skin microtopographic changes due to the pressure exerted by the stylus on the skin. Moreover, it was a time-consuming procedure, and could not accurately measure minute skin surface contours due to the physical size of the stylus tip, as shown in Figure 1.
