Ablation of femural bone with femtosecond laser pulses--a feasibility study.

Although lasers are nowadays widely accepted as a popular scalpel of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), one of the most common orthopedic surgeries-the replacement of the knee joint-is still performed using an ordinary oscillating saw. Since ultra-short laser pulses are usually considered to be inefficient regardless of their high precision, the newest development of femtosecond laser systems has not yet been clinically applied to any mass ablation situation. However, thin disk Yb:KYW lasers meanwhile provide sufficient output power to ablate bone tissue within a reasonable time frame. Our results mainly focus on ablation rates obtained at different spot distances, repetition rates and pulse energies. It is shown that femtosecond laser pulses at high repetition rates are a promising tool for orthopedic surgery.