Spectral Analysis of the Acoustic Signal During Ablation of Biological Tissue with Pulsed CO2- Lasers.

The advantages of laser osteotomy are free cut geometry and minimal thermal damage. Due to the lack of haptic feedback there is need for an alternate feedback method for accurate Laser Osteotomy. Based on the frequency analysis of the acoustic signal, generated by the ablation process, we are developing a feedback system to obtain in situ information on the ablation and for differentiation between different sorts of biological tissue. We used a pulsed slab CO2-laser (wavelength 10.6 µm, pulse length 80 µs) and piezoelectric sensors for sound detection. We studied the correlation of the ablation signal of different kinds of tissue in the frequency domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]