Effect of thermal damage and biaxial loading on the optical properties of a collagenous tissue.

Thermal denaturation can induce marked changes in the optical and mechanical properties of collagenous tissues. The optical properties are important in both therapeutic and diagnostic applications of lasers in medicine. Although mechanical stress can be caused by collagen shrinkage in laser-based therapies, how the mechanical loading state affects the optical properties is not well understood. We used a new computer-controlled biaxial testing system to subject bovine epicardium to various loading conditions both before and after multiple levels of thermal damage. An integrating sphere technique was used to measure transmittance and diffuse reflectance, from which absorption and scattering coefficients were calculated using a Monte Carlo method. Results showed that the scattering coefficient increased with increasing mechanical load but decreased as the degree of thermal damage increased. There was no significant change in the absorption coefficient due to thermal damage over the ranges studied.