ABSTRACT
The holy grail of therapeutic laser applications in most clinical settings is to ablate the target tissue efficiently while minimizing collateral damage to adjacent tissue structures. Historically, this type of medical application of laser technology has largely been driven by empirical research in an effort to determine the mechanisms and results of aiming a given laser, often one that happened to be available, at a specific type of tissue and observing both (bio)physical interaction processes and histopathological results. More often than not the lasers used were far from ideal in terms of their wavelength or pulse duration.
