Resurrecting Urine Flow with IQ's Phoenix™ BPH Laser
The US Patent Office has informed InnovaQuartz that our multi-wavelength surgical laser, that we have dubbed the Phoenix, has issued (US Pat. No. 9,220,563), precisely one year after it was filed. This laser addresses the deficiencies of other photoselective lasers – photobleaching, charring -- for minimal collateral tissue damage at wavelengths between 380 nm and 450 nm. Phoenix targets multiple tissue chromophores, tissue breakdown products and melanoidins, short-circuiting char formation.
20th CENTURY LASER SURGERY
Surgical procedures for removing excess tissue blocking the male urethra (BPH) have advanced a great deal in past decades using laser energy delivered by side firing fibers, virtually eliminating side effects that were common for the century-old wire loop procedure (TURP); incontinence, impotence and TUR-syndrome were greatly reduced. At the end of the millennium NIR lasers led the field, exploiting strong absorption of infrared by the water in all tissues. Then, by targeting highly vascular tissues and sparing tissue like nerves, green lasers became dominant in a procedure called photoselective vaporization for high absorption in hemoglobin, all but eliminating the troubling side effects, but the surgery was slow.
21st CENTURY ADVANCEMENTS
General anesthesia has its own set of risks, so surgical speed is almost as important as surgical precision. To make green lasers faster the laser power rose from 80 W (2002) to 120 W (2006) to 180 W, today. Higher laser power does speed surgery by about 50%, but improvement stalls because the hemoglobin in tissue is destroyed even at the original 80 W, in a process called photobleaching. Additional laser power merely chars bleached tissue, and while char does absorb very well, carbon particles also randomly scatter the laser’s light, reducing surgical precision so some side effects return.
PHOENIX™ to RISE in 2016
