New and potential medical applications for flashlamp excited dye lasers

Summary form only given. Flashlamp-excited dye lasers (FEDL) are routinely used today to treat effectively urinary calculi and cutaneous vascular lesions. Although the types of lasers used for these are both FEDLs, their outputs are vastly different. For stone fragmentation, microsecond, millijoule pulses in the blue-green are used, while for vascular lesions, yellow millisecond-regime, multi-joule pulses are used. These applications demonstrate the versatility of the FEDLs in their ability to generate widely different outputs. This ability to tailor the laser output to optimize the treatment makes the FEDL the ideal laser for a number of new applications