Topic description

Context. The skin serves as the body’s outermost protective layer and must retain its elasticity, firmness, and tensile strength. Assessing its biomechanical properties is essential for accurate diagnosis, monitoring treatment responses, and improving theragnostic strategies. Since the mechanical behaviour of biological soft tissues is highly dependent to their physiopathological state, clinicians often rely on palpation, a subjective experience-dependent method with limited sensitivity, to detect abnormalities in superficial tissues. To address these limitations, various non-invasive techniques, such as elastography, have been developed to quantitatively evaluate tissue elasticity. However, despite their precision, these imaging techniques remain costly and complex to operate.

A practical, low-cost, and real-time method for non-invasive skin characterization has been proposed by the MSME lab. The approach involves an instr...