Sapphire needles, probes, and fibers for medical diagnosis and laser treatment

We summarize and discuss multifunctional medical instruments based on sapphire shaped crystals. Such instruments are able to combine several modalities, such as interstitial exposure to laser radiation, fluorescent diagnosis, as well as tissue resection, aspiration and cryodestruction. Sapphire instruments enable biocomopatability, withstand extremely low and high temperatures, along with operation in harsh environment. Sapphire fibers and waveguides also allows imaging of biological objects in THz range. In visible and infrared ranges, these instruments can be combined with optical fibers via small internal channels, which can be produced during sapphire crystal growth by means of the edge-defined film-fed growth (EFG) technique. This talk covers the resent developments and experimental investigations of sapphire needles, cryoapplicators, scalpels, and fibers.