Corneal epithelial injury thresholds for multiple-pulse exposures to erbium fiber laser radiation at 1.54 μm

Corneal epithelial damage thresholds for exposures to sequences of pulses of 1.54 μm infrared radiation produced by an Er fiber laser were investigated. Thresholds were determined for sequences of 8 to 128 pulses at a repetition frequency of 10 Hz and 8 to 256 pulses at 20 Hz. The duration of the individual pulses was 0.025 sec and the 1/e diameter of the laser beam was 0.1 cm. The results show that threshold damage is correlated by an empirical power law of the form H _th = CN ^β, where H _th is the threshold radiant exposure per pulse, and N is the number of pulses. The constant C is different for the 10 Hz and 20 Hz exposures and, for both cases, is greater than the estimated threshold for a single 0.025 sec pulse. Thus the empirical power law breaks down for small numbers of pulses (viz., N< 8), where it overestimates the damage thresholds. Temperature calculations for the threshold exposure conditions show that a critical temperature model also correlates the multiple-pulse injury thresholds.