Apparatus for patterned plasma-mediated laser ophthalmic surgery

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9693905-B2
Application number	US-201615238584-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Aug 16, 2016
Priority date	Jan 10, 2005
Publication date	Jul 4, 2017
Grant date	Jul 4, 2017

Abstract

A system for ophthalmic surgery on an eye includes: a pulsed laser which produces a treatment beam; an OCT imaging assembly capable of creating a continuous depth profile of the eye; an optical scanning system configured to position a focal zone of the treatment beam to a targeted location in three dimensions in one or more floaters in the posterior pole. The system also includes one or more controllers programmed to automatically scan tissues of the patient's eye with the imaging assembly; identify one or more boundaries of the one or more floaters based at least in part on the image data; iii. identify one or more treatment regions based upon the boundaries; and operate the optical scanning system with the pulsed laser to produce a treatment beam directed in a pattern based on the one or more treatment regions.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A laser surgical system for making incisions in ocular tissue during a surgical procedure, the system comprising:
a laser system comprising;
a laser operable to generate a pulsed laser beam configured to incise ocular tissue in a posterior pole of the eye, the pulsed laser beam comprising a plurality of laser pulses;
a scanning assembly; and
an imaging device capable of creating a continuous depth profile of the eye, the profile comprising information regarding the location of the one or more ocular tissues in the posterior pole; and
a control system operably coupled to the laser system and configured to:
operate the imaging device to acquire image data corresponding to a depth profile of the one or more ocular tissues in the posterior pole;
identify one or more treatment regions in the posterior pole based upon the image data;
identify a location of one or more floaters based in part on the image data;
operate the scanning assembly to scan a focal zone of the laser beam in a treatment scanning pattern within the one or more treatment regions at a predetermined position in the posterior pole,
each of the plurality of laser pulses scanned in the treatment scanning pattern sufficient to create a rupture zone in the ocular tissue in the posterior pole;

wherein positioning of the focal zone in the treatment scanning pattern is determined in part by the control system based on the image data.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the each laser pulse a wavelength between 800 nm and 1,100 nm, a pulse energy between 1.0 microjoules and 1000 microjoules, a pulse duration between about 100 femtoseconds and about 10 picoseconds, and a pulse repetition rate between 1 kHz and about 100 kHz.

3. The system of claim 2 , where a distance between consecutive laser pulses in the treatment scanning pattern is equal to or less than a width of the rupture zone.

4. The system of claim 3 , wherein the distance between consecutive pulses is determined by a scanning rate of the focal zone in the treatment zone and a repetition rate of the pulsed laser beam.

5. They system of claim 2 , wherein the pulse energy of the laser pulses in the treatment scanning pattern is a greater than a threshold energy for dielectric breakdown.

6. The system of claim 2 , wherein the imaging device comprises an optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging device.

7. The system of claim 6 , wherein the control system is configured to control the scanning assembly to scan the laser beam relative to the lens to provide the sample input to the OCT imaging device to generate three-dimensional location data for an anterior capsule of the lens of the patient's eye; and the control system is configured to determine an anterior capsulotomy scanning pattern based on the three-dimensional location data for the anterior capsule.

8. The system of claim 2 , wherein the treatment scanning pattern is an anterior capsule incision scanning pattern configured to scan the focal zone to different depths, and wherein the focal zone is first scanned at a maximum depth and then scanned to sequentially shallower depths.

9. The system of claim 2 , wherein the control system is configured to control the laser and the scanning assembly to scan the focal zone of the laser beam to segment the lens into the discrete fragments by scanning the focal zone in one or more lens fragmentation scanning patterns.

10. The system of claim 9 , wherein the discrete fragments are sized to be removable through a lumen of an ophthalmic aspiration probe.

11. The system of claim 9 , wherein the one or more lens fragmentation scanning patterns include at least one of a linear pattern, a planar pattern, a radial pattern, a circular pattern, a spiral pattern, a curvilinear pattern, or two or more overlapping line segments.

12. The system of claim 9 , wherein: scanning the focal zone in the one or more lens fragmentation scanning patterns comprises sequentially applying laser pulses to different depths within the lens; and the laser pulses are first applied at a maximum depth within the lens and then applied to sequentially shallower depths within the lens.

13. The system of claim 2 , wherein: the scanning assembly comprises a z-axis scanning device and a transverse scanning device, the z-axis device being operable to change the location of the focal zone of the laser beam parallel to the direction of propagation of the laser beam, the transverse scanning device being operable to scan the location of the focal zone transverse to the direction of propagation of the laser beam; and the scanning assembly is configured such that the laser beam is acted upon by the z-axis scanning device before being acted upon by the transverse scanning device.

14. The system of claim 2 , wherein the control system configures the treatment scanning pattern based in part on an input from a user interface.

15. The system of claim 2 , wherein the input is the lateral size of the treatment scanning pattern.

16. The system of claim 2 , wherein the controller calculates a number of pulses required for producing the treatment scanning patter based on the lateral size of the treatment scanning pattern, a size of the rupture zone.

Assignees

• Optimedica Corp

Inventors

• Palanker Daniel V
• Blumenkranz Mark S
• Mordaunt David H
• Andersen Dan E

Classifications

• A61F2009/00878

  Planning · CPC title

• A61F2/1602

  Corrective lenses for use in addition to the natural lenses of the eyes or for pseudo-phakic eyes · CPC title

• A61F9/008 Primary

  using laser · CPC title

• A61B2018/00577

  Ablation · CPC title

• A61F2009/00897

  Scanning mechanisms or algorithms · CPC title