Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Thermal Ablation in Biological Tissues Using Short Pulse Lasers

For the past few years various photothermal methods such as Laser-induced Hyperthermia [1] and Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy [2] has been developed for tumor ablation. In all of these existing techniques, either continuous wave (CW) or long pulse laser sources have been used, which often produces heat affected zones that are larger than the boundaries of the tumor, which leads to collateral damage of surrounding healthy tissue. Moreover for these applications, either collimated or diffused laser beams are used, resulting in much of the energy being absorbed by tissues at the skin surface and very little remaining energy penetrating the skin. Such drawbacks can be eliminated if a beam from a short pulse laser source is focused directly at the targeted subsurface location. Tight focusing ensures that sufficient intensity to drive nonlinear optical absorption can be achieved with low pulse energy. This technique has been effectively used in applications such as non-ablative dermal remodeling [3] and treatment of striated muscles [4]. However, the use of focused beam from an ultra-short pulse laser source has never been applied to tumor ablation and is investigated in this paper.