During the laser treatments in biomedical fields the patient must not run any risk due to a damage of the fiber delivery systems. Such damages are usually monitored by backscattering. Here an investigation of backscattered signals due to flat, bulb and damaged fiber tips is reported. A fiber directional coupler was employed which has shown noticeable advantages with respect to the conventional beam splitter technique (BST). These results have been exploited to design a practical monitoring device which has been inserted int a fiber-optic delivery system, fed by a Nd:YAG laser.

Date Published: 26 November 1996
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 2928, Biomedical Systems and Technologies, (26 November 1996); doi: 10.1117/12.259959

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2928:
Biomedical Systems and Technologies
Nathan I. Croitoru; Martin Frenz; Terence A. King; Riccardo Pratesi; Anna Maria Verga Scheggi; Stefan Seeger; Otto S. Wolfbeis, Editor(s)