Interaction of body fluids with carbon surfaces

The use of medical implants allows one to improve patients lives, and quite often it can return patients back to normal activity in their personal and professional lives. One of the most difficult problems, which is necessary to solve, is a proper selection of the materials to be used for implant construction and/or implant coating. The surface of an implant is exposed to continuous contact with body fluids and several unwanted processes may occur there. Titanium and its alloys are generally accepted as the best tolerated materials for implants. But currently many efforts are focused on thin layers of crystalline carbon, i.e. diamond like carbon (DLC) and nanocrystalline diamond (NCD), used for coating of metal implants. This technology was successfully applied in bone surgery (screws), and more recently in heart surgery (stents). We found, with the fluorescence microscopy technique, that bacterial growth was possible on stainless steel, to a lesser degree on titanium, but NCD was almost totally resistant to bacterial colonization.