Recently, the team of Huang Wenhua, professor of the School of Basic Medicine of Southern Medical University, and Wu Yaobin, associate professor, made new progress in the research of 3D printing personalized piezoresistive anti scar orthosis. Relevant achievements were published in Advanced Functional Materials.
Pressure therapy is an effective method for clinical treatment of hypertrophic scar and keloid. However, traditional treatment devices can only assess the treatment pressure intermittently based on the clinical experience of doctors or use external sensors, which is difficult to achieve accurate control of treatment pressure. During the treatment, if the pressure is too low, the curative effect is not ideal. If the pressure is too high, it will cause skin ischemia, necrosis and other adverse reactions. In addition, scars are often located in anatomical areas with high skin tension and complex morphology and structure. The pressure device prepared by traditional technology is difficult to accurately fit these complex contours, which often leads to unsatisfactory treatment results.
Based on the embedded 3D printing process, the research firstly developed and optimized the printing ink suitable for the preparation of personalized piezoresistive anti scar orthosis, and further screened the support media for ink free molding. By optimizing the printing speed, printing pressure and other parameters, a variety of porous structures and complex three-dimensional structures were successfully prepared in the support medium. Based on the experimental results of piezoresistive sensitivity, stability and response time of the sensing element, it is confirmed that the piezoresistive orthosis prepared in this study has significant advantages of high sensitivity, fast response, strong stability, and excellent mechanical properties and biocompatibility. Finally, through finite element analysis, the design of anti scar orthosis was optimized, and orthosis mediated pressure treatment was carried out on the rat tail scar. During this period, the electrical signal change of the orthosis was regularly monitored to ensure effective pressure treatment, which verified the rehabilitation effect of 3D printed piezoresistive anti scar silicone orthosis on hypertrophic scar.
The personalized anti scar orthosis developed by the team that can precisely control the pressure has ideal mechanical properties, sensitive electrical properties and excellent biocompatibility. It shows great potential in personalized and precise scar treatment, and provides new ideas and strategies for the treatment of more pathological scars with special parts and complex structures.
Relevant paper information: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202400208
