We present a miniaturized ultrafast laser surgery probe for vocal fold restoration therapy. Previous benchtop studies have shown that sub-epithelial voids can be created within scarred vocal folds via ultrafast laser ablation to improve the localization of injected therapeutic biomaterials. Clinical translation of this laser surgery technique requires miniaturized high numerical aperture optical systems to treat scarred vocal folds within intact human larynges. The probe presented here provides the small form factors, high pulse energy delivery, and tight beam focusing required for sub-epithelial void formation in scarred vocal folds in vivo. We created large sub-epithelial voids within porcine hemilarynges and injected fluorescently-tagged hydrogels into these voids to demonstrate the probe’s expected performance in vivo. We conclude by discussing integration of the probe into a transportable system as well as future studies to assess clinical viability of this system.
Calcium fluoride and zinc sulfide crystals exhibit broad multispectral transparency and are used for a multitude of optical applications. However, they both belong to a soft brittle crystal category and are mechanically challenging to process. Thus, a fabrication protocol using a single-point diamond turning method was developed, which can yield surfaces with optical quality for these materials. By using a diamond turning tool with low waviness (≤100-nm waviness) and by using feed rates of 1 and 0.2 μm / rev, CaF2 and ZnS surfaces with surface roughness of 6 and 5 nm were manufactured, respectively. Design and fabrication of a miniature objective with 0.5 NA are also presented, which was developed for the ultrafast laser microsurgery application. The objective consists of CaF2 and ZnS lenses to withstand the high power from ultra-short laser pulses and to provide a tightly focused beam with 1.23 μm 1 / e2 spot radius for laser ablation. Based on the spot size measurement of the objective, its performance was considered to be near diffraction limited.
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