With the highest mortality rate among rheumatic diseases, scleroderma leads to the painful formation of thick skin and organs. The cause of this thickening is the overproduction of collagen protein in the skin. The pathogenesis scleroderma is not fully understood and there exist no good disese models to provide context for drug discovery. To tackle this problem, we created a disease model of scleroderma with 3D printed collagen containing fibroblasts, MATLAB and confocal microscopy to observe optical properties mu and rho, which can be directly mapped to the scattering coefficient and scattering anisotropy. These optical properties varied with collagen levels and served as our metric for disease model severity. Our observations were based on the correlation between Rho and Mu values in the decay -- Signal = Rho*e(-Mu*Z) -- of the light absorbed over the depth of the tissue. We found that in our scleroderma model the Rho and Mu values increased with age and collagen concentration.
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