Liquid metal enabled injectable biomedical technologies and applications

Liquid metals are arousing increasing interests among many challenging biomedical and healthcare areas, owing to their exceptional merits such as outstanding fluidic behavior, excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, tunable mechanical property, high plasticity, low vapor pressure, and favorable biocompatibility. Recent endeavors indicate that liquid metals have quickly become a new generation of functional biomaterials in both fundamental research and practical applications. Especially, their uniquely low viscosity and water-like flowability as metals in liquid state enable many unconventional biomedical operational modes through the easy-going injection way. This would mold a highly beneficial technology with numerous advantages distinguishing from those traditional open surgeries. This review is dedicated to systematically draft a new area of liquid metal enabled injectable biomedical technology based on their unique characteristics, summarize the recent representative developments and the associated biomedical progress. The state-of-art materials, technologies, and devices will be interpreted. Scientific opportunities and challenges will also be discussed. As emerging injectable biomaterials, the fundamentals, technology, and potential applications of the liquid metals would endow injectable operations to fulfill urgently biomedical demand as well as stimulate further endeavors along this critical direction. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.