Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to invite you to contribute a research paper and/or substantial review to this Special Issue on “X-Ray Imaging of Biomaterials”. Those two topics have been strongly intertwined ever since the discovery of X-rays 125 years ago by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Using X-rays, we were finally able to visualize not just the skeleton but the entire anatomy of living creatures. When computed tomography (CT) was developed in the late 1960s, X-ray imaging became the leading tool for volume image acquisition. In the 1980s, micro-CT was developed, and material science was immediately at the center of attention of this new method which spread like wildfire when third-generation synchrotron facilities were set up with imaging beamlines micro-CT was added to these stations in 1990. Three decades later, their efforts have produced several offspring of micro-CT, e.g., phase contrast and/or darkfield X-ray imaging, X-ray fluorescence mapping, X-ray microscopy, and in particular the recent advances through lens-less ptychography. All these techniques—or, sometimes, their combination—have found profound applications in the study of microanatomy and diseases which impact on the latter, as well as in advancing the development of novel biomaterials in implants, particularly in scaffolds.

With the dire situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and with third-generation synchrotron sources upgrading their power worldwide, boosting their X-ray imaging capabilities to unprecedented levels, researchers in this field are called upon to define new strategies for using the data obtained by these powerful tools to advance the field and/or speed up the understanding, containment, and treatment of new diseases. These are challenging times, very much like 125 years ago.

Dr. Simon Zabler
Dr. Jarosław Zubrzycki
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Micro-CT, computed tomography
• Biomaterials
• Phase contrast imaging
• X-ray scanning
• (fluorescence and scattering)
• Correlative imaging (or correlative tomography)
• Biomedical imaging
• Small-animal studies by in vivo CT
• Biodegradable scaffolds
• Additive manufacturing of biomaterials
• Medical implants (tooth, hip, knee, spine)
• Bio-inspired materials
• Bionics