Imaging of clinical wound samples

Routine skin biopsies performed for diagnostic purposes result in epidermal wounds, which typically heal over 2 to 6 weeks. If a malignant lesion is identified in the biopsy, an excision may be recommended to ensure that the malignancy is completely removed. If an excision is performed before the biopsy wound has completely healed, the resulting specimen will incidentally contain the re-epithelializing biopsy wound edges. We obtained anonymized H&E stained and unstained tissue sections from an excision specimen in which the re-epithelizing biopsy wound edges were visible, but no residual carcinoma was present. Unstained slides were processed for immunofluorescence and imaged using the procedures describe above in “Fixation, staining, and imaging of epidermal cultures.” This study was approved by the UT Southwestern Institutional Review Board.