About this Research Topic
Classically, most medical devices, such as surgical implants, have been designed and manufactured on a mass scale, and are limited in their ranges of size and shape. Such limitations have triggered the quest to develop devices that are personalised according to patient anatomy but may still be manufactured on a “mass customization” basis. Medical imaging approaches, based on MRI or CT images of the patient’s anatomy, are essential for the future of developing personalised medical devices, including implants or scaffolds, that are made to biomechanically conform to the patient.
In the last decade, medical imaging quality, as well as image processing techniques, have improved rapidly, enabling local biomechanical and geometric properties of the affected area to be more clearly derived. In this way, by developing new personalised devices that conform to the individual patient’s anatomy, more tissue will be preserved during surgery, surgical procedures will be simplified, patient recovery time will be shortened, and the likelihood of treatment success will be improved. Moreover, these imaging advances have enabled the development of new supporting platforms for surgery planning and diagnosis, with a knock-on implication for reducing global health-care costs.
Due to this fact, imaging and device biomechanics are a hot topic among the medical, industrial and academic domains, who are all striving for the optimisation of design, biomaterials, prototypes, and image processing in order to bring personalised devices to the market in an accessible, more automated and efficient manner. This Research Topic intends to bring together medical researchers and engineers willing to present new products and processes that can contribute to the design and biomechanical optimisation of personalised implant devices.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Device biomechanics design and prototyping;
• Biomaterials and smart materials for medicine;
• Implant design and production processes;
• Computational modelling of biomechanics and biological processes;
• Medical image processing;
• Machine learning diagnosis support;
• Robotics in medicine;
• Surgery planning;
• Additive manufacturing;
• Scaffolds design and manufacturing;
• Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine;
• Biofabrication.
Keywords: Medical Image, Surgery Planning, Medical Devices, Computational Modelling of Biomechanics, Additive Manufacturing
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.