Surgical sutures fibres

Nylons 6,6 and 6 are the ones usually employed as textile fibres. Where individual monofilaments are used, such as in brushes, sports equipment, or surgical sutures, nylons 6,10 and 11 tend to be used, because of their greater flexibility and water resistance. All nylons can be injection moulded and the resulting articles have found widespread use in engineering applications, such as bearings and gears. 

Meanwhile Ethicon (and others) developed alternative absorbable surgical sutures, based, for example, on copolymers of polyglycolide with poly-L-lactide or poly(trimethylene carbonate), and on polydioxanone, and on poly(e-oxycaproate), and also on copolymers of these with polyglycolide or with each other. These different structures made it possible to provide fibres with different rates of absorption, with different degrees of stiffness or flexibility, and for use in monofilaments, braided multifilaments, and other yam structures, as required for different surgical operations. 

Mechanical properties are usually considered when application for medical devices is concerned. For example, sOk has been used as surgical suture. SUk sutures show good ordination and mechanical strength along the fibre orientation direction. 

There are many medical and surgical devices of various shapes and sizes made of aliphatic polyesters.These devices are made by various processing routes. In general, large-scale devices such as sutures [e.g. Dexon (100%PGA),Viciyl (copolymer of glycolide in combination with L-lactide), Monocry 1 (copolymer of e-caprolactone) or Maxon (copolymer of trimethylene carbonate)] and macroscopic implants used for bone fixation can be manufactured by solvent-or melt-spinning processes. The fibre forms can then be drawn under different conditions in order to orient the polymer chains. Fibres prepared... 

Collagen has been used in a variety of biomedical applications. Collagen fibres obtained from bovine intestine or the submucosal layer of sheep intestine, after purification but not loosing their original forms, has been used as sutures for closure of surgical or... 

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