Computational Biophysics of the Skin

This book has the ambition to gather, for the first time, chapters describing scientific computing and numerical modeling for a deeper understanding of mechanisms involved in skin physiology. The book is structured around some skin properties and functions, including optical and biomechanical properties, skin barrier function, and homeostasis, covered through several chapters describing either biological or physical models at different scales.

The accessibility of the skin in vivo has resulted in the development of non-invasive methods in the past 40 years that offer accurate measurements of skin properties and structures from microscopic to macroscopic levels. However, the mechanisms involved in these properties are still only partly understood. Similar to many other domains, including biomedical engineering, numerical modeling has appeared as a complementary key actor for improving our knowledge of skin physiology.

This book presents, for the first time, the contributions that focus on scientific computing and numerical modeling to offer a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in skin physiology. The book is structured around some skin properties and functions, including optical and biomechanical properties and skin barrier function and homeostasis, with—for each of them—several chapters that describe either biological or physical models at different scales.