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."

Comments

Incident Rate?

[JoeShmoe950]

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?

Wow

[gcnaddict]

"can harm you if they escape from their enclosures ... if a fiber wall is about to break"

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 :P

Is it worth it?

[Aundy]

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%?

Safety critical == timing, timing, timing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

LASIK surgery is not without risk. But this technology is for example for removing clots around the heart (angioplasty), currently this is done using quite ordinary optic fibers if they go the laser route. (The most common methode is still a little balloon with a stent) This technology could improve the reliability a bit (but I never heard of anything going wrong, so....). Anyway, even with a breaking optical cable and shooting someone in the wrong place is less damaging then having to cut up someones sternum to do bypass surgery.

Re:Isn't tin toxic?

[Xarius]

I'd like to think the metal would also be enclosed by something else, a layer of heat resistant plastic or something.

Nic0le is a PageRank spammer, MOD DOWN

[karmatic]

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.