| In recent years plasma medicine has been a new and promising field, which has attracted many interests in some research groups. Cold atmospheric plasma contains reactive oxygen species (ROS), reactive nitrogen species (RNS), electromagnetic fields, heat, ultraviolet (UV), many kinds of ions and radicals depending on the working gas. Cold atmospheric plasma has shown the ability to initiate, control, promote, and catalyze various complicated behaviors and responses in biological systems. It is demonstrated that ROS in the cold atmospheric plasma are capable of destroying a broad spectrum of microorganism as well as trigging selective natural mechanism of blood coagulation. Topical application of proper concentration of H2O2stimulates the process of wound closure by activating redox-dependent pathways and nitric oxide (NO) plays a very important role in regulating skin’s response to infection and wound healing as a mediator. NO can regulates blood vessel tone and blood coagulation, early apoptosis and immune system, neural communication and memory, relaxation of flat bronchial and gastrointestinal muscles, hormonal and sex functions. NO can offer anti-tumor and anti-microbial defense, etc. Cold atmospheric plasma is usually produced in the ambient air, rare gases or a mixture of them, which can be used to treat heat-sensitive objects directly. Cold atmospheric plasma can be tailor-made to fulfill the medical requirements by tuning the discharging voltage, distance or working gas.Skin is the largest immune organ of human beings. The primary function of the skin is to protect the inner environment from pathogens invasion and consequent severe infections. Therefore, cutaneous wound healing has been studied intensively for a long time. Wound healing is a dynamic and complex biological process that involves the reparative phases of inflammation, proliferation and remodeling. Interrupting any of these phases may result in chronically unhealed wounds, amputation or even patient death. Despite the clinical significance in chronic wound management, no effective method has been developed for quantitative image-guided treatment. Thus research on cold atmospheric plasma therapy of cutaneous wound is of great importance.The main contents are as follows:A portable plasma source is designed. The device can generate voltage high enough to ionize the ambient air to produce cold atmospheric plasma applying on skin directly. The device takes advantage of switching power supply technology, which can boost DC12v to about ten thousands of Volts. The device is of small size, portable and low power consumption.A control experiment was designed. A dorsal skin-fold chamber model on nude mice was adopted to explore the effects of plasma therapy on cutaneous wound healing. Twelve nude mice were equipped with dorsal skin-fold chambers and equally divided into the following three groups:(1) control group without any treatments;(2) treated by cold plasma for2minutes per day;(3) treated by cold plasma for30seconds per day. A multimodal imaging system is used for non-invasive assessment of the wound healing process. The therapeutic effect of cold plasma is monitored by a multimodal imaging system that integrates multispectral and laser speckle imaging modules into a single configuration. The results show that prior treatment the cold atmospheric plasma can increase the blood perfusion and oxygenation and a long-time of observation shows that the blood perfusion level of the experiment level drops back to normal level earlier than the control group. |
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