Optical properties of human blood vessel wall and plaque.

Optical properties of blood vessel wall and plaque from human cadaver material are presented for the argon laser (514.5 nm), He-Ne laser (633 nm), and the Nd-YAG laser (1,060 nm) wavelengths. Measurements were performed with an integrating sphere arrangement and analyzed in terms of Kubelka-Munk absorption and scattering coefficients.

Modeling of (coronary) laser-angioplasty.

A first attempt to describe (coronary) laser angioplasty is presented using simplified but standard optical and thermal modeling of tissue in interaction with a laser. Ablation behavior of blood thrombi and plaque has been approximated from numerical computations for various wavelengths representing the Ar, Nd-YAG, and CO2 lasers. The overall results, in terms of calculated depth of ablation versus laser irradiation time, show a relatively fast initial process followed by a very slow one.