Development of an irradiation laser system for phototherapy mediated by nanoparticles

• Autor(a) principal: Garcia, Diogo Manuel Matos Mourão de Frias
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/134618
• topic: Skin cancer; Phototherapy; Photothermal therapy; Optical system; Irradiation system; Zoom lens; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

Cancer is a disease associated with high morbidity and mortality, which led to the devel-opment of clinical techniques to deal with this illness. Phototherapy is one of these methods. It is seen as a good solution to this problem due to its low invasiveness and prevention of DNA damage of healthy cells with the usage of non-ion-ising radiation. Advances in this technology have been made, and, in order to increase the safety of the procedure, it has been coupled with photosensitising agents, particles characterized by high absorbance at specific wavelengths. Since these agents possess high affinity towards tumour cells, it is possible to induce necrosis or apoptosis of unhealthy tissue with localised thermal energy. Nevertheless, increased safety and optimisation are pursued so it was considered that a beam delivering system capable of almost exclusively target tumour cells, protecting healthy ones, independently of the size of the cancer, should be the next step since few literature was found on the development of these systems. Two resolutions are proposed. A zoom lens based optical system able to dynamically vary its output beam diameter, focusing on the malignant tissue at once, and a galvanometric mirror system that allows the scanning of the area of the tumour, requiring a sweeping pattern due to the smaller output beam diameter employed. Despite both solutions producing promising results, to achieve clinical implementation is still needed the development of an apparatus that integrates the zoom lens based system and the testing in the laboratory of the galvanometric mirror system.