Introduction: We investigated the characteristic of a suitable irradiation on skin's tensional strength using design of experiments (DOE). The experiments in this research are designed in two phases and data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used for performance measurement of each phase.
Material and Methods: Samples were provided from pleura as surface tissue made of collagen and elastin fibers. In each experiment, the sample was stretched before and after irradiation. Variation of the sample length was measured. Then force-length data were plotted and the slope of the fitted line was calculated. Variation in these slopes was used as a criterion to determine tissue strength variation after laser irradiation. Furthermore, the output oriented DEA model by variable return to scale was used to examine performance of the designed experiments for each phase.
Results: Results of the first phase experiments showed that the main effect of time duration was significant; but this was not the case for beam radius. Regarding polarization, only its interaction effect with time duration was significant. Results of the second phase indicated that laser irradiation with parallel polarization for 10 seconds caused a greater increase in tensional strength. Resultant efficiencies of applying DEA showed that the first phase experiments were more efficient.
Discussion and Conclusions: This research has combined DEA and DOE to investigate the effects of laser on skin elasticity. Comparing the results of the two phases indicates that it is more efficient to use the experimental design of phase 1 in our experiment. So for similar future studies, we suggest using more levels for experiments of phase 1 instead of doing the experimental design in two phases.