Return to Main Page . Inc. Harnessing Cheap Diode Lasers to Power a Low-Cost Surgical Laser S urgery is performed tens of millions of times a year in the United States, and it is usually a painful, risky procedure for the patient. It is also risky for the surgeon in terms of malpractice liability. Patients, surgeons and health insurance companies are constantly looking for new, less-invasive procedures to replace conventional surgery.
Laser surgery is a prime candidate.
One problem that limits this approach, however, is the price of equipment. This ATP project with Cynosure, founded in 1991, was designed to develop a smaller, less-expensive laser source for surgery and other applications. The problem with this approach in the past has been the difficulty of exactly aligning all 200 beams before they go into the diffractive optics transformer that collimates them into one tight, powerful beam. Minor inaccuracies in the alignment of the individual lasers can greatly degrade the performance of the system. Cynosure's innovation was to develop an automated system to custom-mill arrays of 200 corrective lenses to match arrays of 200 diode lasers.