Experimental study on the performance of chitosan-based SWCNT+ICG pre-dressing for assisting laser joining of skin tissues

A chitosan-based pre-dressing incorporating SWCNT and ICG is designed to assist laser-mediated skin tissue joining, effectively improving joining stability and reducing thermal injury. The pre-dressing achieves a tensile strength of 0.480 MPa and a low degree of thermal denaturation of 0.276, significantly enhancing the safety and efficacy of skin tissue joining. Skin trauma, characterized by high prevalence and slow self-healing capacity, demands urgent advanced interventions, while laser tissue joining—widely applied in biological tissue approximation—is constrained by insufficient laser energy absorption and severe thermal damage to adjacent tissues. In this study, we designed a 4 % (w/v) chitosan-based pre-dressing incorporating SWCNT and ICG to facilitate laser-mediated skin tissue joining, effectively reducing thermal injury, improving joining stability, and addressing the low tensile strength of single-component chitosan pre-dressings. Experimental results show that under optimized laser parameters (5.68 W power, 300 mm/s scanning rate, 1 mm defocus distance), the pre-dressing achieves a tensile strength of 0.480 MPa and a degree of thermal denaturation as low as 0.276, with microstructural texture parameters (e.g., ASM, Contrast, Entropy, Correlation) outperforming single-component systems and significantly enhancing the safety and efficacy of skin tissue joining.