Losing Focus: Can It Be Useful in Robotic Laser Surgery?

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to regulate the tissue temperature during laser surgery by robotically controlling the laser focus. Laser-tissue interactions are generally considered hard to control due to the inherent inhomogeneity of biological tissue, which can create significant variability in its thermal response to laser irradiation. In this study, we use methods from nonlinear control theory to synthesize a temperature controller capable of working on virtually any tissue type without any prior knowledge of its physical properties. The performance of the controller is evaluated in ex-vivo experiments.