Advances in all-solid-state lasers for medicine

In corneal sculpting, mid-infrared wavelengths provided by optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) access similar corneal absorption features to those exploited by excimer lasers. While creating high power UV solid-state lasers can be quite expensive, mid-IR outputs are relatively well developed using optical parametric oscillators (OPOs). The tunability of OPOs also allows selectivity of absorption characteristics between the regimes of ablation and coagulation.