Introducing Progress in Biomedical Engineering; Issue 2 Vol 2

Progress in Biomedical Engineering is a new interdisciplinary journal publishing high-quality authoritative reviews and opinion pieces in the most significant and exciting areas of biomedical engineering research. Invited content by leading experts on the current state of the science and emerging trends aims to fuel discussion on the future direction of research. In our first and second issues this year, we have four topical review articles. In the first review article related to medical devices, Xia et al present and discuss intravascular sensors to assess unstable plaques and their compositions. Vulnerable atherosclerotic plaques can rapture, which can create acute cardiovascular events and sudden cardiac deaths as a major health issue all around the world. Existing methods such as coronary angiography lacks the capacity to provide detailed information about exact lipid-rich, fibrotic or calcified type of properties of the lesion. Therefore, novel catheter technologies have been proposed for the assessment of atherosclerotic plaques, which integrates intravascular ultrasound with photoacoustic microscopy or optical coherence tomography and utilizes stretchable electrodes for electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. While these technologies are promising for the identification of the complexity and composition of potentially unstable plaques in animal and human trials, real-time detection of such plaques in clinics is still a significant challenge. This article highlights existing and emerging intravascular sensors to assess unstable plaques and their compositions. The authors report the advantages, limitations, future directions, and potential clinical applications of such sensors. the fundamentals and state-of-the-art the future of vascularization of engineered tissues, which is a grand challenge in engineering regenerative A new recent tissue engineering sub-field, called vascular tissue engineering, to a