An Update of Peripheral Laser Angioplasty

In the early 1980s the potential for the use of lasers to ablate atheroma was demonstrated experimentally by Macruz [31], Lee [24] and Choy [5]. The first in vivo human work appeared in 1984 [13, 15]. Early studies [7, 16, 20] with bare fibres coupled to Argon and Nd: YAG (neodymium: yttrium aluminium garnet) generators produced only a fine channel with a modest (50%) technical success rate. However, the results were associated with an unacceptable number of arterial perforations (25–30%).