Pulsed CO2 laser tissue ablation: measurement of the ablation rate.

Ablation of guinea pig skin using a CO2 laser emitting 2-mu sec-long pulses has been quantified by measuring the mass of tissue removed as a function of incident fluence per pulse. The mass-loss curves show three distinct regimes in which water evaporation, explosive tissue removal, and laser-induced plasma formation dominate. The data are fit to two models that predict that the mass removed depends either linearly or logarithmically on fluence. Although the data are best fit by a linear dependence upon fluence, plasma formation at high fluences prohibited obtaining data over a wide enough fluence range to differentiate unambiguously between the two models. Ablation efficiency, ablation thresholds, and the optical penetration depth at 10.6 micron were obtained from the measurements.