While lasers have commonly been used for eye surgery for several years, they are rarely used in other medical procedures. Google wants to change this fact with a patent pending surgical system that uses lasers to remove biological tissue, such as malignant cancerous tumors.
The laser system is an interesting result of what happens when a tech company gets involved in medicine. Under its new parent company Alphabet, Google’s life sciences division became an independent company and was renamed Verily on December 7, 2015. The new company combines Google’s background in data analytics and engineering with medical expertise to develop technology to improve human health.
The patent points out that since laser beams can be extremely narrow, they are ideal for precisely targeting small areas of tissue. The patent application explains how the laser ablation system would work:
“An active tracking system includes an imager configured to image the temperature of a biological tissue and a heating laser configured to heat regions of the biological tissue. The imager locates high-temperature regions of the biological tissue and the heating laser is controlled to point toward target regions of the biological tissue based on the located high-temperature regions. The active tracking system can be used to control a heating laser to continuously heat a target region of a biological tissue even when the target region moves relative to the heating laser. The active tracking system could allow one or more target regions of a biological tissue to be ‘tagged’ with heat by the heating laser and to be tracked even when the one or more target regions move relative to the heating laser. Devices and methods for operating such active tracking systems are also provided.”
