Advances of Medical Textiles

Dear Colleagues, 

Medical textiles are an emerging interdisciplinary field, positioned among conventional textile technologies—weaving, knitting, embroidery—and other scientific fields such as chemistry, medical science, pharmaceuticals and electrical engineering. Medical textiles are an advanced branch of technical textiles, offering much more than commodities. The immense growth of this field significantly broadens the diversity and performance of products belonging to the category of medical textiles, ranging from disposable baby diapers, feminine hygiene products,  bandages and health care personnel coats to specialized and personalized high-tech products as monitoring devices, blood filtration membranes, implants and more. The latter categories have a high technical sophistication in order to meet the required safety regulations and appropriately react to biological complexity when facing the challenges of the human body. For such extensions of traditional use, the textile manufacturing processes are adapted- and/or integrated with other processing technologies with the capacity to form composite structures with different levels of complexity in terms of composition and architecture, such as coating, lithography, and 3D/ink-jet printing. Such an integrative approach can elicit the ˝smart˝ function into the fabrics to sense and respond to electrical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, optical, or magnetic stimuli, to deliver drugs in a predictable and controlled manner, to provide high mechanical resistance (sutures, heart valve prosthesis, hernia and incontinence meshes), selectivity (blood filtration), and much more. 

To this end,  we invite you to submit original research articles and review articles covering the following topics:

• Non-implantable and implantable medical textiles;
• Smart, responsive medical textiles;
• Drug-releasing textiles;
• Textiles in rehabilitation, healthcare, and hygiene;
• Textile composites encompassing the (bio)polymeric, metallic, or inorganic components;
• Advanced textile manufacturing (electrospinning, 3D printing…) for high-tech medical devices;
• Regulation on medical textiles.

We look forward to your submissions of new and prospective studies involving advanced medical textiles. 

Dr. Selestina Gorgieva
Dr. Andrea Zille
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Textiles is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.