Surface characterization of silicate bioceramics.

The success of an implanted prosthetic material is determined by the early events occurring at the interface between the material and the body. These events depend on many surface properties, with the main ones including the surface's composition, porosity, roughness, topography, charge, functional groups and exposed area. This review will portray how our understanding of the surface reactivity of silicate bioceramics has emerged and evolved in the past four decades, owing to the adoption of many complementary surface characterization tools. The review is organized in sections dedicated to a specific surface property, each describing how the property influences the body's response to the material, and the tools that have been adopted to analyse it. The final section introduces the techniques that have yet to be applied extensively to silicate bioceramics, and the information that they could provide.