Use of the wound healing trajectory as an outcome determinant for acute wound healing.

Accurate and clinically practical methods for measuring the progress of acute wound healing is necessary before interventions designed to optimize and even accelerate acute wound healing can be applied. Complete wound closure rates and operative wound closure severity are irrelevant to most acute wounds since most are closed at the time of primary tissue repair and remain closed throughout healing. Analogous to chronic wound closure, the rate of increase of incision tensile strength progressively decreases as time passes and 100% unwounded tissue strength is never achieved making the endpoint definition of "healed" vague. Conceptualizing acute wound healing in terms of its design elements with reintegration into a final outcome lends itself to the description of acute wound healing as a mathematical trajectory. Frequently such an equation is a rate expressing the change in an acute healing parameter, most often tensile strength, over time. Such an approach also normalizes misinterpretations in analysis or errors in theory developed by measuring healing parameters at fixed points in time. Distributions of fractional strength gain times (e.g., 85% normal strength) can be determined using statistical methodology similar that used for failure time of survival analysis. Preclinical studies show that acute wound healing trajectories can be shifted to the left from a "normal" or "impaired" curve to an accelerated or more "ideal" curve. A useful method for measuring acute wound healing outcomes is therefore required before the basic science of acute wound healing is inevitably applied to the problem of acute surgical wounds.