Applications of lasers to biology and medicine

The applications of lasers to medicine and biology have grown very rapidly over the last decade and now include a wide variety of activities. These range from eye surgery through holographic microscopy and pattern recognition to the sealing of dental enamel. This paper reviews some of the fundamentals which underlie these applications and briefly reviews a few of the more significant applications themselves. In particular, the interactions between lasers and the biological material are discussed in an attempt to develop a physical foundation for the applications of lasers to surgery. This is followed by a discussion of the threshold for laser damage to eyes and the application to the repair of detached retinas and diabetic retinopathy. Applications of lasers to more general surgery, such as cutting of the liver, and to the special problem of microsurgery in embryology, are treated briefly. A variety of other papers and books have treated some aspects of this subject [1]-[5]; however, this paper presents a concise treatment of major applications with more than usual emphasis on the background physics. The background on holographic microscopy and pattern recognition is not treated here, but is partially covered in [6]-[9].