Oral surgery tool based on femtosecond laser: Ultraviolet or near-infrared?

Femtosecond lasers are a valuable tool for high precision surgery instead of nanosecond lasers. Oral surgery is a direction of research in the field. Hard bone tissue drilling experiments performed with the same femtosecond laser system at NIR and UV wavelengths are reported. The ablation threshold value of human mandible bone, which is the hardest bone of the skull, was also determined. It was not found significant difference between thresholds (1.3 J/cm² for IR beam and 2.1 J/cm² for UV beam). UV ablation is more precise but limited at higher pulse energy.