Surgery of benign pathological alterations of the vocal folds results in permanent disphonia if the bounderies of the vocal fold layers are disregarded. Precise cutting with a femtosecond laser (fs-laser) combined with simultanous imaging of the layered structure enables accurate resections with respect to the layer boundaries. Earlier works demonstrated the capability of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for utilization on vocal folds. The layered structure can be imaged with a spatial resolution of 10-20&mgr;m up to a depth of 1.5mm. The performance of fs-laser cutting was analyzed on extracted porcine vocal folds with OCT monitoring. Histopathological sections of the same processed samples could be well correlated with the OCT images. With adequate laser parameters thermal effects induced only negligable damage to the processed tissue. The dimensions of the thermal necrosis were determined to be smaller than 1&mgr;m. OCT contolled fs-laser cutting of porcine vocal fold tissue in the &mgr;m range with minimal tissue damage is presented.

Date Published: 13 July 2007
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6632, Therapeutic Laser Applications and Laser-Tissue Interactions III, 663207 (13 July 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.728139

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6632:
Therapeutic Laser Applications and Laser-Tissue Interactions III
Alfred Vogel, Editor(s)