Multiple-pulse skin damage thresholds at 1070 NM

As solid-state laser technology continues to mature, high-energy lasers operating in the near-infrared (NIR) band are increasingly being utilized in manufacturing, medical, and military applications. Guidelines for the safe use of these systems have been established as formulations of maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limits for a given set of laser parameters, based on past experimental studies of exposure thresholds causing injury to the skin and eyes. However, in the case of skin, these formulations do not take into account the pulse characteristics of the exposure and only utilize the total exposure duration when calculating the MPE. The purpose of this study was to characterize the skin response to multiple-pulsed high-energy laser exposure at the NIR wavelength of 1070 nm, at a constant beam diameter of 1 cm, and using anesthetized Yucatan mini-pig subjects. A constant total laser-on time was explored as single- and multiple-pulse sequences. Multiple-pulse exposures had identical individual pulse d...