Quantification and the underlying mechanism of skin thermal damage: A review

Skin thermal damage is the most common thermal trauma in civilian and military communities. Besides, advances in laser, microwave, and similar technologies have led to recent developments of thermal treatments for diseases involving skin tissue aiming at inducing damage precisely within targeted tissue structures without affecting the surrounding healthy tissue. Pain sensation accompanying thermal damage is also a serious problem for burn patients. Therefore, it is of great importance to quantify the thermal damage in skin tissue. In this review, we detail the progress of the state-of-the-art mathematical models and experimental methods for the quantification of thermal damage (both heat damage and cold damage) and the general development of thermal treatments in tissue engineering. This could enable better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of skin thermal damage and the optimization of clinical thermal therapies.