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Smart Optical Fibers Could Save Lives
Roland Piquepaille writes "Lasers are now commonly used for surgery. With them, you can recover a better sense of vision. Or a tumor inside your body can be eliminated. But these laser light beams, which are currently enclosed inside optical fibers, can harm you if they escape from their enclosures. But now, according to Technology Review, MIT researchers have designed smart optical fibers which can monitor their status while the laser is doing its magic inside you and shut it down if a fiber wall is about to break. So far, the technology is only working in labs, but it could be used for medical applications in a few years."
Personally I would have hoped they would already have a technology in place to stop lasers destroying vital parts of your body while in surgery.
I mean, I know several people who've gotten LASIK surgery on their eyes, and its been around for years, yet I've never heard of a laser 'breaking' and damaging anything. Is this a solution looking for a problem?
I think self-monitoring fiber optics would be GREAT in the datacom industry... in the medical field its surely a 'nice to have'.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why do they always seem to post 6 MIT stories a day during the last month of admissions? :|
With the current "unsmart" lasers, what is the rate of misses right now? have there been any dangerous or even fatal laser misses, and how much safety will this new method actually bring about?
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"can harm you if they escape from their enclosures ... if a fiber wall is about to break"
:P
That possible? Gee, thanks for making me not want to have LASIK done on my eyes >_ Seriously, I hope this technology comes out of testing and into RWU (Real world use) very soon. If this kind of news leaks out, public paranoia will be all the rage
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Aren't already 99% of lazer surgeries succesfull? So will it be worth it to buy and install the new technology to make it 99.9%?
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More information appears in a PDF linked off of Fink's bio page. Apparently they use tin in the coating as the conductor. When that melts, the circuit breaks.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
On a medical robotics project a long while back for remote keyhole surgery we used ADA, partly for it's abiliy to mesh
with a formal spec and have the program 'proven'. No matter how you cut it (splash) the thing that bothered us most was that even when detecting a critical error there is always a timing factor, a certain number of cycles that would inevitably lie between the error being thrown and the system shutting down to a safe state. ADA is a strongly typed and very error safe language, but it is sluggish. A lot of damage can be done in a short space of time. In the end the solution was to break the prog into essentially two threads, one monitoring the other at all times and never more than 20ms from a total power shutdown. In 20ms you can do real damage with a laser that you cannot do with a mechanical device. I think few people realise just how much thought goes into these systems, and I have great respect for the difficulty of this problem.
I work in the medical laser industry (as a software engineer, but I use the actual the devices all the time, and understand our hardware). We use a fiber laser. If the fiber were to break, the device would simply stop working.. because the fiber is clad in a metal armored jacket! I'm certain most delivery devices are similar. Part of the reason for this is you must maintain a minimum bend radius on the fiber, or it is very easy to exceed the total internal reflection constraints on it. The second thing is, our lasers have back reflection fault indicators, which also can go off if anything optically bad happens down the line. Anyone who knows of a medical device that has naked fiber being used to treat can feel free to correct me, but that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen for more reasons than the article states.
...anyone ever thought of using an opaque sheath around the fibre optics?
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
I'm sure they've considered problems such as this, but it occurs to me that tin isn't exactly good for the human body, is it really wise to run what amounts to a wire sheathed with tin into the body, particularly when the system is designed so that the tin will begin to melt if the system is about to fail, thereby releasing tin into the blood stream? On the other hand, the tin sheathing should help protect the fiber optic cable from mind controlling signals from the government much better than aluminum would.
I've done some research into complications of LASIK surgery as my father has had it done and I'm interested in getting it done myself. From what I can tell, problems are farily rare and are almost always correctable. When my father had his surgery done, there was a problem with his left eye. Since, he has been back twice and they paid for both surgeries. He now has perfect eyesight in both eyes. Don't get me wrong, safer is always better. But in all the searching I've found, all of the problems were due to a mistake on the surgeon, not faulty equipment. This is a very informative site I've found. http://www.allaboutvision.com/visionsurgery/lasik_ complication_1.htm
Someone save me from this sanity.
When world domination can be had by mounting LASERs on sharks -AND- still be PETA friendly! ;)
just a side comment. we should remember that PUBLIC HEALTH has saved more lives than surgeries and medicines. Vaccinations, smoking cessation, access to clean water, things like that. fiberoptics for communications will save more lives than laser surgery. as a physician, i have to remind my self that alot of what i do is just icing on the cake.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Or a tumor inside your body can be eliminated. Middle Aged Man: Thank heaven! I can finally get that bug out of my mother-in-law's . . . Middle Aged Man's Wife: Herbert!
Thanks for responding to critics. I didn't think you'd do it, but you've shown me you might actually be human after all.
safer laser beams on their heads!
If you look at Nic0le's Comment History, you can see he's just another PageRank scammer.
Mod him below 1, and the links will never show up to Google.
I work with 20 Watt NIR laser, and I've burned myself with it. When you hold your finger in the beam accidentally, it hurts, and you move your finger.
.this is not a sig
The thing here is that it is a collimated beam. The kind that doesn't really lose its power density over distance. So I can be burned many meters away. This light must be coupled into a fiber with a high numerical aperture lens - and by the same token the light must be collimated when leaving the fiber.
Straight out the end of a broken or cut fiber, the light is highly divergent. It would take less than a meter for the 20 W beam to become eye safe (but maybe not eye smart). The only way for a bare fiber to hurt anything is if it brushes right against it, and even then it's a pretty small wound compared to the size of any organ.
I'm interested to see their justification for all of this.
-m
http://www.rp-photonics.com/fiber_fuse.html
Basically light is absorbed at a point of damage in the fiber, creating a tiny plasma ball that burns backwards towards the source and destroys the fiber, preventing further output. The size of the plasma ball is very small (on the order of the size of the fiber core).
Maybe you just stuff some graphite between the bare fiber and the jacket. Then when the fiber core breaks it superheats a tiny bit of the graphite and begins the fiber fuse process - preventing further transmission of laser light.
And then maybe I just gave away a $1M invention.
-m
Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article so I don't how they achieved it. But If I had to do it I would just make a double fiber (fiber going inside a fiber). The laser light would go through the internal fiber while the outer layer would remain dark with sensors monitoring it. If there's light detected in the external fiber- immediate shutdown! Well, did I gess right? Do I get a patent now?