Editorial: Special Issue of the Italian Chapter of the European Society of Biomechanics dedicated to “Biomechanics for in silico clinical trials”

The 9th Meeting of the Italian Chapter of the European Society of Biomechanics (Bologna, 30 September - 1 October 2019) included a Thematic Symposium on “Biomechanics for in silico clinical trials”. Despite being a meeting of the National Chapter, it always has an international audience. This edition, also thanks to the Thematic Symposium, had a high number of papers with international authors (more than 20 papers out of 72), and international keynote speakers. We felt it was the right time to have a Thematic symposium on in silico trials, as this is definitely an emerging field, not quite mature yet for extensive deployment, and for this reason posing every day new challenges to scientists and to engineers. The choice of the topic is linked to the growing reliability and improved performance of computational models that are changing the approach to clinical tests. New pharmacological treatments, new devices and new surgical techniques can be tested through virtual models by means of numerical simulations. In this context, the understanding of the biomechanical mechanisms plays a fundamental role, since tissue mechanics is linked in a direct and indirect way to the evolution of physiological and pathological conditions. Although the road seems to be marked to favour the exit of the in silico world from laboratories to the clinical side, still a number of open challenges in the field of basic research, industrial developments and regulatory needs remain. The scientific community is then called for applied and interdisciplinary research efforts. The aim of this Special Issue is to collect to-date and advanced results in the field. Interestingly, this is collecting the effort not only of groups working in the field of numerical simulations, but also experimental ones, for the possible synergies. In particular, this Special Issue collect the best papers that were shortlisted by the Scientific Committee and by the Award Committees for the different awards assigned during the meeting.