Ultrashort pulsed laser ablation for application in cancer surgery

We present the successful application of ultrashort laser pulses for the precision ablation of cancerous tissue. This is a potential alternative to overcoming limitations of conventional tumour-surgery tools in terms of precision and collateral thermal damage. The correlation of high-speed imaging of both the ablation process and the resulting plume dynamics with a histopathological analysis of the post-process tissue morphology enables the optimisation of the tissue removal rate whilst avoiding adverse cavitation effects. This facilitates minimal collateral damage for a range of clinically relevant tissue types. In addition, the resulting dynamics for the laser-tissue interaction are visualised using high-speed x-ray imaging through the samples. Precise and effective tissue removal is presented for the epithelial laser ablation of colonic tissue with the translation of this process towards infiltrating brain and head and neck cancer surgery further discussed.