LIBS based Tissue Differentiation for Er: YAG Surgical Laser

The analytical technique laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is becoming an attractive technique in the field of medicine. One emerging application is the differentiation of biological tissues in real-time during laser surgery. This work attempts to further investigate the use of LIBS together with a surgical Er:YAG laser. The main goal here is to investigate the effect of body fluids as potential contaminants during LIBS based differentiation of soft tissues. Furthermore, the work attempts to exploit the use of the surgical laser as a cleaning laser and compares the effect when only the LIBS laser is used for tissue differentiation. The study shows that body fluids have a significant influence on the LIBS spectra and that a surgical laser might serve as an in-vivo cleaner leading to improved tissue classification during laser surgery.