ANN output energy control for laser surgical ophthalmic microscopes

This work presents the technical aspects for the development of a firmware for a Nd:YAG laser based ophthalmic surgery microscope. The software designed for a Microchip® PIC18F4550 microcontroller interfaces the electronic blocks of the device and allows the calibration of the laser energy attenuator. This paper mainly describes the experimental setup and presents the experimental data for an innovative energy attenuator which can be used for ophthalmic microscopes. The main advantage of the system is that the physician can operate with any value of energy of the laser beam and the system does not contain moving parts. Several methods to compute the coefficients for energy control are proposed and their performances are evaluated.