Abstract

Laser angioplasty offers the potential of a therapeutic technique to open occulded or restricted arteries with reduced incidence of restenosis, Although different laser techniques are employed to minimize the excessive tissue damage by using either flash-lamp pumped pulse dye laser for selective tissue ablation or XeCl excimer laser, Ho:YAG laser, and more recently frequency-tripled Nd:YAG laser tor nonselective but damage-limited tissue ablation, current experimental studies have been complicated by perforations of the vessel wall, which occurs due to the lack of a suitable diagnostic technique to differentiate atherosclerotic lesions from normal portions of the vessel wall and to monitor the laser tissue ablation process.

© 1992 Optical Society of America