InnovaQuartz LLC

I made a few hundred of these this morning. We call them "baguettes" after the tiny chips of diamond in jewelry...for obvious reasons. These are the largest ones I make at 1.2 mm. The smallest ones I've made so fat are 0.8 mm. if I can get that down to 0.4 mm or so, then coronary artery disease treatment will be forever changed and stents will be a thing of the past.

The trick is keeping the apex of that conical section super sharp. You see, the highest radiant power of the laser resides in the center of the beam and that's the part that imparts the apex, where the light is focused axially instead of being reflected and refracted to exit orthogonal to the longitudinal axis. (We want 100% orthogonal, if possible.) For the larger devices I make tips with a radius of curvature (ROC) at about a red blood cell diameter (0.010 mm) work really well with less than 1% of the laser emission exiting axially.

If that same radius were on a 0.4 mm cone the axial emission (leakage) would be probably be over 5%. That might work, but it would present problems in designing the catheter's plastic parts and could limit the tortuosity of the arteries that could be addressed. I really need to get the tip to around 0.004 mm ROC and that just isn't possible with a 0.0106 mm wavelength (CO2 laser). So I've ordered a 0.000267 mm wavelength laser and hope to get that incorporated into my R&D machining system before the summertime.

My parts should be clean and dry now, so I should get back to work...

This is Prometheus. It's designed for braking up large urinary stones found in the ureter and bladder. Such stones typically eat laser fibers for lunch, meaning the efficiency of the surgery falls off rapidly because the fiber tips get damaged rapidly. Most folks attribute this damage to flying stone fragments. I am not so sure that's right, but if it is, this fiber will last a lot longer than the ones used today.

Normal fiber tips are 'cleaved'-- they are scored and snap cut, leaving a sharp edge and relatively flat surface. Both are easily chipped by flying stone debris. These tips are also usually 0.6 mm in diameter, although some are as large as 1 mm but the bigger fibers cost a boat load of money. (I know, I make some of them.)

Prometheus tips are 1.2 mm in diameter but the fiber is only 0.6 mm, so right there we have the robustness of the largest fiber available -- plus some -- at the cost of the smaller fiber. That won't matter if it's toast in 5 minutes like regular fibers, though, so I made it with a focusing lens that allows working a few millimeters away from the stone. The round profile adds to the resistance against damage from fragments, too, deflecting some and eliminating any sharp edges that are easily chipped.

I think it's going to be a winner for large stones, particularly coupled with our new thulium laser. We did a stone case with the laser the other day -- a 4 cm diameter staghorn stone -- and finished in 45 minutes with a regular 0.6 mm fiber. Thulium lasers don't usually do very well with large stones...this one did as well as a holmium.

Scientists are finally studying the important stuff, eh?