About Advanced Interventional Materials

Advanced Interventional Materials

Advanced Interventional Materials is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access research journal dedicated to all aspects of interventional medicine, with a particular focus on the materials and devices that make minimally invasive, image-guided treatment possible. It is published by KeAi Communications in Beijing, China, with publishing services provided through Elsevier, and its articles appear on ScienceDirect under the DOI prefix 10.1016/j.advim. The journal was launched as a new title in the mid-2020s: its guide for authors records a pre-launch period running from 2025 to 2028 during which all article processing charges are fully waived, and its earliest published articles carry 2025 DOIs, including article 100002 in the journal's first sequence.

Purpose and intended community

The journal states that it aims to promote the exchange of innovative ideas and research findings among the many kinds of specialists who work at the forefront of interventional material-related disciplines. It names that community explicitly: biomedical scientists, materials researchers, chemists, physicists, engineers and other leading experts. That breadth is the journal's defining editorial choice. Interventional medicine depends on physical objects — wires, catheters, balloons, stents, embolic agents, cements and ablation probes — whose performance is decided as much by polymer chemistry, surface science and mechanics as by clinical technique. A journal that addresses clinicians and materials scientists in the same pages is intended to shorten the distance between a material invented in a laboratory and a device used in an angiography suite, and the journal's scope, article types and open-access model are all organised around that exchange.

Scope: designing new interventional materials

The first strand of the scope is the design and preparation of new-type interventional materials themselves. Alongside it sit intelligent biomaterials and biodevices — materials and devices that can sense, respond or adapt during a procedure — and theranostic materials and technology, in which diagnosis and therapy are combined in a single material or platform. The journal covers polymer-based interventional materials and, more broadly, polymer, inorganic and composite materials used in intervention. It also covers biomaterials and nanotechnology for the design of medical micro- and nanorobots and implantable devices, nanomaterials for biosensing, bio-imaging and therapy, and materials for artificial intelligence applications and brain-machine interfaces. A further listed strand is methods and criteria for assessing the performance of interventional materials — the testing and evaluation science without which new materials cannot be compared, regulated or adopted. Together these topics define the journal's upstream territory: the invention, engineering and evaluation of the material toolkit of interventional medicine.

Scope: devices for vascular and image-guided procedures

A second strand of the scope is device-centred. The journal covers balloons, stents, filters, catheters and other related materials and devices used in angiographic and vascular techniques. It covers materials for endovascular embolisation or reconstruction — the deliberate blocking of blood flow to treat aneurysms, malformations and tumours, and the rebuilding of vessels from inside. It covers techniques for the precise injection of drugs into diseased tissue, giving as examples intra-arterial and intratumoural chemotherapeutic drug injection and bone cement injection. It also covers materials for ablation procedures on tumours or thrombi, including radioactive materials used in such procedures. These are the workhorse interventions of interventional radiology and interventional cardiology, and by naming them individually the journal signals to device researchers and clinician-inventors exactly which procedure families it expects submissions to address.

Scope: clinical territories

The third strand of the scope is organised by clinical territory. The journal lists interventional materials for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular applications, for neuroradiology, for hepatobiliary radiology, for the urinary system and for gynaecology, among other areas. It separately lists materials for bone or joint repair and for bone tumour therapy, and biological 3D printing for orthopaedics and tissue engineering — a recognition that interventional techniques extend well beyond blood vessels into the musculoskeletal system and regenerative medicine. A closing category of other interventional materials keeps the scope open to applications the editors have not enumerated. For readers, this structure — materials science first, devices second, clinical fields third — makes the journal usable in two directions: a materials researcher can find the clinical problems their work could solve, and a clinician can find the material options available for a problem in their own specialty.

Article types

Advanced Interventional Materials publishes a wider range of article types than many research journals. Its listed formats are Full Length Articles (research articles), Reviews, Short Communications, Editorials, Highlights, Errata and Practice Guidelines. Full-length articles carry original research on materials, devices and applications. Reviews synthesise sub-fields that move quickly, such as embolic materials or theranostics. Short communications provide a route for concise, timely findings. Highlights and editorials allow the journal to draw attention to significant papers and developments, while the inclusion of practice guidelines is distinctive: it gives the journal a channel for consensus and how-to material aimed at practising interventionists, not only at researchers. That combination reflects the journal's stated purpose of exchange between laboratory and clinic — the same issue can, in principle, contain a new material, an evaluation of its performance and guidance informed by its clinical use.

Open access and the launch-period charge waiver

The journal is fully open access: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Its guide for authors states that Advanced Interventional Materials adopts the open-access publishing model to facilitate the global accessibility of top scientific achievements. Unusually, and helpfully for a new journal trying to attract its first cohorts of authors, the guide records that during the pre-launch period from 2025 to 2028 the journal implements a full article processing charge waiver for all accepted manuscripts, so authors pay no APC at all in that window. KeAi journals normally fund open access through an article publishing charge paid by authors, their funders or their institutions; waiving it entirely for the launch years removes the main financial barrier to submitting to an unproven title, and is a concrete sign that the publisher is investing in building the journal's author base and citation record before normal charging begins.

Publisher: KeAi Communications

KeAi Communications Co. Ltd is based in Beijing and was co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier, a combination KeAi itself describes as a unique joint venture in the international publishing industry. Since it was repurposed as an open-access journal publishing service provider in 2013, KeAi has developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across all scientific disciplines. KeAi leverages the publishing and technology capabilities of its parent companies, including ScienceDirect hosting, Editorial Manager submission systems, data analytics and production. Submissions to KeAi journals are screened automatically using iThenticate's CrossCheck service within the editorial system to detect plagiarism and overlapping text, and KeAi journals support ORCID identifiers for authors. For Advanced Interventional Materials, that means a Beijing-published journal with Chinese institutional roots but with submission, review, production and dissemination running on the same infrastructure Elsevier uses for its international catalogue.

Peer review and publication practice

The journal describes itself as peer-reviewed, and its publishing practice follows the standard KeAi and Elsevier pattern documented in its guide for authors. Manuscripts are submitted online, assessed by the editors for suitability, and sent for peer review; accepted articles are published open access on ScienceDirect with DOIs in the 10.1016/j.advim series. The presence of an article numbered 100002 with a 2025 DOI in the journal's record shows the title moving from announcement to published content during its launch period. Because the journal is new, it does not yet carry the long indexing and metrics history of established interventional-medicine titles; its early volumes, its waiver-backed submission pipeline and its ability to attract the cross-disciplinary community it names — materials scientists and clinicians publishing side by side — will determine how quickly it establishes itself. Its scope, however, is precisely drawn around a real gap: the materials layer of interventional medicine, treated as a subject in its own right rather than as an appendix to clinical journals.