Yesterday, Google got itself a new patent that describes a surgical system for removing living tissue with a laser that delivers high temperature electromagnetic radiation. The company had applied for this patent last year in May which was long before we actually had the standalone life sciences company under Google’s now umbrella company, Alphabet.
The tech is something that doesn’t exactly come under Google’s mainstream works. As has been the norm, Google mostly deal with software based technology like its web search engine, mobile operating system etc. However, one would know for a fact, that its isn’t surprising to see Google go down the hardware road and that too in the medical sector.
As per Google, the new patent is for an active tracking system which includes an imager configured to image the temperature of a biological tissue and a heating laser configured to heat regions of the biological tissue.
The imager locates high-temperature regions of the biological tissue and the heating laser is controlled to point toward target regions of the biological tissue based on the located high-temperature regions. The active tracking system can be used to control a heating laser to continuously heat a target region of a biological tissue even when the target region moves relative to the heating laser.
The active tracking system could allow one or more target regions of a biological tissue to be `tagged` with heat by the heating laser and to be tracked even when the one or more target regions move relative to the heating laser. Devices and methods for operating such active tracking systems are also provided.
While we aren’t quite certain when the company will actually make use of this tech and bring it to the market, if ever, one thing’s for sure, this laser system could revolutionize the medical sector. It could be used to remove tumours, heal cancers and a lot more.
But we might have to actually wait another decade and a half and see what happens–largely because such complex systems are take that much time post getting theoretically approved as a patent.
