Poor haemocompatibility is a main issue of artificial cardiovascular materials in clinical application. Nitric oxide (NO), produced by vascular endothelial cells, is a well known inhibitor of platelet adhesion and activation. Thus, NO-releasing biomaterials are beneficial for improving haemocompatibility of blood-contacting biomedical devices. In this paper, a novel method was developed for enhancement of haemocompatibility by exploiting endogenous NO donors. TiO2 films were firstly synthesized on Si (1 0 0) wafers via unbalanced magnetron sputtering technology, and then polydopamine was grafted on TiO2 films and used as a linker for further immobilization of cystamine. The obtained surfaces were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis. NO generation is evaluated by saville-griess reagents, and it shows that cystamine immobilized samples are able to catalytically generate NO by decomposing endogenous S-nitrosothiols (RSNO). In vitro platelet adhesion results reveal that cystamine modified surfaces can inhibit collagen-induced platelet activation. ELISA analysis reveals that cGMP in platelets obviously increases on cystamine immobilized surface, which suggests the reducing of platelet activation is through NO/cGMP signal channel. It can be concluded that cystamine immobilized surface shows better blood compatibility by catalyzing NO release from the endogenous NO donor. It may be a promising method for improvement of haemocompatibility of blood-contacting implants. (C) 2011 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.