Use of electronic speckle pattern interferometry on the human skull sutures behaviour

The human skull, under internal and external forces from inner fluids, mastication or gravity, appears as a deformable system. Have the sutures between the skull constituting plates a role to play in its dynamics? It has become an important question within the osteopathic and medical world. The big controversy between the osteopathic experience of adapting plates with respect to constraints, and the medical commonly approved strictly rigid sutures and plates, is here investigated with electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI). Although having been limited to only one skull, a systematic study of the sagittal and coronal sutures behaviour around Bregma zone, under point compression constraint, has led to measured deformation profiles suggesting a playing role of these plates frontiers. The relative movements of plates with respect to their neighbours appears to behave differently with respect to the suture inner structure and has been compared to bone without suture. With the help of phase shifting, the ESPI has revealed to be the real adequate instrument for such an object.