| Hemocompatibility test is very common and important during development of biomaterials in direct contact with blood. Moreover, silk fibroin based biomaterials have been used in biomedical application for more than one hundred years and increasing sharply. Recent reports from our group and others have demonstrated that it has acceptable mechanical properties and patency rates in animal models. Unfortunately, pure silk fibroin shows poor hemocompatibility. Thus, the surface of a silk fibroin should be modified to improve its blood compatibility when it is used as a blood-contacting material especially for small diameter arterial prostheses. Researchers have studied hemocompatibility of silk fibroin biomaterials; however, the testing procedures vary greatly throughout different publication. Thus it is not easy to get the exact information from the literatures to performing hemocompatibility assays. Therefore, this paper reviews the studies on effects of surface modification on hemocompatibility in terms of hemolysis, anticoagulation, platelets adhesion, plasma recalcification time (PRT), activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) and plasma prothrombin time (PT) assays of silk fibroin biomaterials. At last, other physical and biological tests which are also essential and related to the hemocompatibility testing, were also discussed in this paper. |
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