Optical monitoring the degradation of PLGA inverse opal film

Implantable materials have broad applications in tissue engineering and in vivo sensors. It is essential to know the detailed information of the implantable materials during their degradation. In this paper, we developed a method to monitor the degradation process of a well-used biomaterial, poly（lactide-co- glycolide） （PLGA） by taking advantage of inverse opal structure. We found that mass loss, molecular weight and glass transition temperature of PLGA during the degradation process in Hank＇s artificial body fluid can be in situ monitored bv measuring the ootical orooerties of PLGA inverse ooal.