Lasers are cutting it close.April, 2005 | Laser Focus World
Ultrafast lasers link diagnostics and therapy at the cellular level . (Author: Kathy Kincade)
From nanosurgery to cellular manipulation, laser-tissue interaction studies are paving the way for a new generation of medical applications.
For many years, lasers in the medical field were seen primarily as surgical tools for the ablation, cutting, or coagulation of tissue. But in the last decade some of the most successful medical-laser applications have been noninvasive (although “noninvasive” is actually a misnomer here because the effectiveness of each of these procedures requires that the laser energy enter the tissue to effect a change or achieve a biological response)-selective laser trabeculopasty, skin rejuvenation, hair removal, photodynamic therapy, low-level laser therapy, and, more recently, laser treatments of psoriasis, acne, cellulite, and dental bacteria. In addition, laser-based diagnostic tools such as optical coherence tomography and multiphoton microscopy have gained acceptance within the medical community for noninvasive imaging, while optical sensors are finding a place in the detection and monitoring of chronic and other diseases.
March 26, 2005 | New Scientist
Micro scalpel offers unprecedented precision.
What if you could cut a window into a living cell and watch it working? Now you can, says Karen SchmidtCUTTING things up to see how they work has a long, if gruesome, tradition in medicine........
At the microscopic scale, it's a different story. The cooperative workings of nerve cells, say, or the capillaries in the brain, are largely mysterious. Our knives are too crude to work on such tiny things. What if we had a scalpel small enough to dissect this micro world?
Wish granted. A new tool for performing delicate surgery on individual cells is ...
February 4, 2005 | Focus
Our recent work on laser nanosurgery is featured in the Focus section of Daily Texan.
| Lasers are cutting it close. |
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| Media Credit: Joe Buglewicz |
Adela Ben-Yakar, UT professor and one-time aerospace engineer, has gone from studying the lift of airplanes to exploring the inner workings of the nervous system.
February 2005 | Laser Focus World
Ultrafast lasers link diagnostics and therapy.
Adela Ben-Yakar, a former member of Robert Beyer’s research group at Stanford and Mazur’s research group and now assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, is also working with femtosecond lasers for potential nanosurgery applications. In research reported last December in Nature, Ben-Yakar et al used this “laser scalpel” to snip apart a single neuron in the roundworm C. elegans (commonly used in biological research because of its simple cellular structure) to study nerve regeneration without causing any damage to surrounding tissue, allowing the study of the function of individual neurons with a precision not previously possible.December 16, 2004 | College of Engineering News
“Nano-scissors” laser shows precise surgical capability; study also offers nerve regeneration model.
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| Dr. Adela Ben-Yakar, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, led the development of a 'Nano-scissors' laser that can perform extremely precise surgery. Originally from Israel, Dr. Ben-Yakar began her research four years ago at Stanford University and most recently was published in Nature magazine. | |||
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| The background shows a C. elegans roundworm. The bright green dots are neurons, and the thin green lines extending from the neurons are axons. The inset demonstrates where the laser severs the axon. | |||
