Artificial heart valve with NCD coating

Development in thin-layer diamond-like coatings is a very crucial advance in the field of improvement of biomaterial biocompatibility. Owing to their already investigated properties, diamond-like carbon (DLC) and nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) coatings deposited on implants, which are made of materials that can cause undesirable reactions in the organism, can significantly improve the parameters a spare part of the human body should be characterised by. Diamond-like carbon (DLC) is attractive as a wear-resistant coating for biomedical applications due to its high hardness and low coefficient of friction, chemical inertness and smooth surface finish. One important property of both hard and soft DLC is their biocompatibility, and the potential of DLC coatings for biomedical applications has been extensively reported in the literature. In addition to biocompatibility, this potential is related to the fact that DLC is wear-resistant, smooth/low friction, and inert to chemical attack, and it forms a hermetic coating.