It was a real light-bulb moment for Jeffrey Gordon and his team. They had developed a device that would use sunlight rather than expensive lasers to perform surgical procedures such as zapping tumours, and hoped it would make a useful low-cost tool for the developing world.
Unfortunately, while the economics were right, the instrument turned out not to be appealing to surgeons. They didn鈥檛 want to operate only when the sun was shining, as that made it impossible for them to plan their work. 鈥淭he obvious drawback has been the ephemeral nature of sunlight,鈥� Gordon says.
So now the team, from Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, has developed a device that uses light from a cheap but ultra-bright xenon lamp, of the kind used in some car headlights (Journal of Biomedical Optics, vol 11, p 050509). 鈥淚ts brightness is high enough to give the power density we need, a feat unattainable with LEDs and incandescent lamps,鈥� Gordon says.
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The team use a reflector to feed light from a low-voltage 150-watt lamp into a fibre, which delivers a light energy density of up to 2.7 watts per square millimetre. Animal tests have shown the device to be just as effective at destroying liver and kidney tissue as lasers, at a fraction of the cost, says Gordon. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the first time artificial non-coherent light has been used to generate these surgical effects in live animals.鈥�
A Singapore company, Ray Medical, plans to commercialise the technology. Solar panels could be used to generate and store electricity to power the system, Gordon says.
