The definition of state-of-the-art, the K-Series is a continually evolving platform..
The K-Series offers the most complete coverage of the therapeutic spectrum on the market. With dual 800 and 970 nm wavelength selectability, power tunable from 0.1 to 12 Watts (for the K-1200 or 8 Watts for the K-800), spot sizes from 1 – 5 cm2, and frequency modulation from continuous wave through 20,000 Hz, there is virtually nothing another Class IV laser can do that the K-Series cant.
POWER simply defines the amount of energy delivered per second. This quantity has implications in penetration, treatment time, and safety. Click the icon to find out What We Know About Power and HOW WE KNOW
WAVELENGTH, or the color of light, is the principal laser parameter that determines both where the light is absorbed and how much of it will be. Click the icon to find out What We Know About Wavelength and HOW WE KNOW
DELIVERY MODE is VERY important in clinical efficacy and having a variety of options will benefit the patient. Click the icon to find out HOW WE KNOW about the differences.
Today’s technology is gone tomorrow UNLESS you have the ability to evolve. K-Laser offers lifetime upgrades to ensure you will never be left behind. Click the icon to find out about our USB UPGRADEABILITY and why it’s important to have OBSOLESCENCE PROTECTION
Some people like advanced “create your own” options, which is why EVERY treatment parameter can be modified, and every protocol built from scratch. Others like SINGLE-TOUCH NAVIGATION to existing patient’s treatment history. Click the icon to see how K-Laser’s software has something for EVERY USER
Our new ZOOM HANDPIECE with STEEL-CLAD FIBER is now available on all new K-Series. Wrapped in KEVLAR and STEEL CLADDING this fiber is the most flexible and durable in the industry. Click the icon to learn more about WHY OUR FIBER IS TOPS
Different ailments are better treated using different power, wavelength, frequency and treatment time. Not only does the K-Laser take into account anatomy and severity, but it plans for actual tissue make-up. Click the icon to see HOW and WHY WE KNOW
Turning the beam on and off needs to be accomplished in a quick and safe manner to avoid over exposure to the patient and unnecessary hazard to the administrator. Click in the icon to learn about ALL THREE Finger-Switch Activation Modes on the K-Laser’s Zoom Handpiece
The K-Series is fitted with an exclusive ZOOM handpiece that allows the spot size to be changed from 1-5 cm2 on contact. Click the icon to find out why this is HUGELY IMPORTANT for ease-of-use as well as clinical efficacy and HOW WE KNOW
Your facility is not one room. Have the convenience to move from bed to bed or room to room without having to re-plug and re-boot. Click the icon to view the VARITEY OF APPLICATIONS for which being COMPLETELY PORTABLE and BATTERY POWERED is such an advantage.
With a FULL COLOR FULLY TOUCH-SCREEN display, you can instantly navigate through our INTUITIVELY ORGANIZED USER-FRIENDLY platform to find the appropriate protocol. Click the screen to EXPERIENCE THE INTUITION
Power
Power, given in Joules per second or Watts, quantifies the amount of energy emitted from a laser per unit time, which along with wavelength information, determines the rate of photon emission. With knowledge of the optical properties of the tissue to be irradiated, power is the principal quantity that determines both penetration depth and duration of treatment. Biological tissue is a highly turbid medium; that is, it strongly (exponentially) attenuates radiation through a combination of scattering and absorption.
For this reason, it is important to keep in mind your particular clinical application when choosing between lasers. If only superficial dermatology concerns you, than less intricate and less expensive Class II or III lasers may be suitable for you. If instead your focus is subcutaneous, and especially deep muscle or joint ailments, to achieve any analgesic or biostimulatory effects, these lower power lasers simply cannot deliver sufficient dose at depths in the body in reasonable treatment times.
“How do we know?”…
…you may ask. Instead of “guesstimating” or citing other sources of guesstimation, we modeled, simulated, and MEASURED the 3-dimensional penetration of dose. This entire series of experiments is outlined in a poster that was presented at the North American Association of Laser Therapy (NAALT) annual meeting. Click on the poster to download it. But to explain briefly…
….at first-order, our bodies are a tub of water. Water makes up 80% of our cells so this is not a bad start. So the first step was to measure the transmission of radiation through different depths of water. Here is some data. The y-axis is percent intensity from 0-100%, the x-axis is depth in the water phantom in centimeters, and the z-axis gives distance from the central beam axis.
This is a good start but is just an approximation, so lets go one step better…model it.
Here we have an MRI of a canine shoulder. From this you can get a topography of the different tissue-types. Then you simulate 1 billion photons, each of which originates at the red arrow in that direction. Then you run the simulation and track the dose deposition. Here you can see how the beam spreads out both radially and decays with depth in the patient.
Modeling is quite precise, but as always, the most accurate data comes from measurement…
So Dr. Stephens and Dr. Harrington, the directors of R&D and Clinical Education for K-Laser USA, went to Oregon State University to measure it. There Dr. Wendy Baltzer, a board certified surgeon had 6 FRESH canine cadavers, of a variety of breed, coat color, coat length, skin color, and obesity. They brought a series of Silicon detectors, which were sensitive down to microAmps of photocurrent (which is converted to a power) and measured the penetration through several tissue-types at several depths.
With these measurements on all different positions on the several cadavers, they were able to map out exactly how much dose was delivered to the different anatomical positions, and what were the optimal handpiece positionings for the treatment of each possible condition.
This is the first, and by far the most detailed treatment of dosimetry in the industry.
Peak vs. Average Power
For Continuous Wave (CW) lasers, power is a very simple quantity that leads to straightforward energy calculations: peak power is equal to average power, which can be multiplied by treatment time to yield surface energy exposure. When frequency modulation and pulsing are introduced, so are some complexities in energy calculation as well as marketing gimmicks that are often misleading. Average power, the quantity from which energy calculations can be made directly, is the integrated energy emitted per unit time. If for example, you have a 10 Watt peak pulse with 10 millisecond width that pulses ten times per second (10 Hz), the average power is only 1 Watt because the total amount of energy emitted per second is only 1 Joule, even though the peak power is 10 Watts. In fact, the average power for a pulsed beam will always be less than the peak power because of the down time (duty cycle) of the beam. Super-pulsed laser companies often capitalize on the ignorance to this idea when they advertise their “high-powered” lasers with up to 50 Watt peak power, despite their (un-advertised) milliWatt average power.
The K-Series has power tunable from 0.1 Watts (= 100mW) up to 8 or 12 Watts, depending on the model. This means we can tune down to do Class III things (superficial dermatology, wound healing, scar tissue management, etc.) but also have the power to treat those deep musculo-skeletal conditions.
The “therapeutic window” is defined by the blue curves in the figure: melanin (left) and water (right). Radiation outside this range is absorbed very well by these two molecules so shorter wavelengths (visible spectrum) will not penetrate far enough to be therapeutic without doing damage to the skin and longer wavelengths (mid- to far-IR) will cause thermal damage to tissue because of this heightened absorption. The melanin absorption continues to rise steadily through to the ultraviolet region of the spectrum (an evolutionary adaptation that allows us to live in our harsh sunlit environment) and so lasers of shorter wavelength are germicidal, yet are mutagenic to our cells (i.e. skin carcinogenic). Mid IR lasers are mainly surgical in application and take advantage of the high water absorption to ablate cells; that is, vaporized the water in cells to cause highly specific (focused) thermal damage.
Lasers intended for therapy fall into the NIR for another reason. The principal chromophores (i.e. photo-acceptor molecules) in the human body are hemoglobin (the oxygen transporters at the heart of red blood cells) and cytochrome c oxidase (the terminal enzyme in the cellular respiratory chain). You can see from the figure that their absorption spectra peak within this same therapeutic window. In fact, stimulation of either of these molecules by radiation throughout the NIR leads to increased cellular metabolism by increasing either the amount of oxygen available to the cells for processing or by enhancing the efficiency by which the cells convert the oxygen into useful energy (adenosine triphosphate, ATP).
Laser stimulation in the NIR therefore boosts the body’s natural immune system and can combat nearly any pathology to some degree. Some wavelengths are more suited to target different absorption peaks, while others do not specifically target anything. Furthermore, each wavelength provides different penetration depth. Some companies offer multiple wavelength beams with or without the ability to select which wavelength to use for a given treatment; this variability could prove very useful if treating different parts of the body or different depths in the same treatment area.
Delivery mode is another important question from which you can deduce the effectiveness of treatment as well as an estimate of treatment times. Continuous wave (CW) exposure refers to the absence of modulation; that is, the beam’s intensity is constant in time. Because the beam is always at full intensity, calculating energy exposure is straightforward: power output in Watts times treatment time in seconds yields surface energy exposure in Joules.
The K-Series sports three delivery modes:
Continuous Wave
Frequency Modulated – 50% Duty Cycle, with frequencies adjustable from 1-20,000 Hz in 1 Hz increments
Intense Super Pulse – Average Power adjustable from 0.1-6 Watts in same frequency range (with automatic, built-in duty cycle/pulse width adjustment to achieve the requested average power)
Dose Calculation Details
Energy calculation is slightly more complicated with modulated beams, and is determined by the duty cycle (i.e. the fraction of the time the beam is on). Alternatively, if the pulse width is known, the duty cycle can be calculated (i.e. pulse width[seconds] = duty cycle / frequency[Hz]. For example, if a beam is modulated at 100 Hz with a 50% duty cycle, then the beam turns on and off 100 times per second, and is on and off for equal amounts of time, so the energy calculation would follow as before, only corrected by the duty cycle in the form of a fraction (1/2). The pulse width of such a beam would be 1/200th of a second (5 milliseconds), so the beam is on for 1/200th of a second, then off for 1/200th of a second, and so on. If ran at 8 Watts for 10 seconds, the surface energy exposure would be 8 x 10 x 0.5 = 40 Joules.
Beyond mere power output, the treatment area is of paramount importance to understanding the number of photons delivered to the affected area. For comparison, a long tube 100 Watt fluorescent bulb like those in any office building is bright enough to light up an entire room, and it does, in fact, spread 100 Joules of light per second across the entire breadth of a room. If instead, that bulb were only as big as your fist (like a normal incandescent bulb), those 100 Watts would be much “brighter”. Better still, if all of that light was collimated into a beam (as in a laser) the “brightness” would be extreme. The power output simply defines the number of total photons emitted, but it is exactly the concentration (density) of the photons that dictates the number of photons delivered to a target area.
To illustrate this common misconception, here is a short video showing the K-Laser’s Zoom capabilities with a power meter.
From the spot size, then, we can calculate the more meaningful quantity of power density: average power (Watts) divided by spot size (cm2) yields power density in Watts/cm2. This value determines the penetration depth of treatment as well as the amount of heat a patient will feel during laser therapy. For a given power setting, smaller spot sizes concentrate all of the photons on a smaller area and so penetration will be deeper. Consequently, the heat will be more concentrated and the patient will feel it. The versatility to change the spot size during treatment will provide the ability to relieve any discomfort without discontinuing the treatment.
The K-Series is fitted with an exclusive ZOOM handpiece that allows the spot size to be changed from 1-5 cm2 on contact. This spot size can be increased further as you retract the handpiece from the surface.
Note: Air attenuates infrared radiation 10,000 -100,000 time LESS than tissue, so treating on the surface is NOT necessary. A spot size of 5 cm2 while in contact is identical to a 5 cm2 beam from a distance. The K-Laser allows you the option to keep this treatment constant while off the surface of, for example, an open wound. This can NOT be achieved with a fixed spot-size handpiece, because as you come away from the surface, the spot size will necessarily increase thereby necessarily decreasing the power density of the treatment.
Turning the beam on and off needs to be accomplished in a quick and safe manner to avoid over exposure to the patient and unnecessary hazard to the administrator. Some laser companies do not offer any remote switching, requiring the user to move back and forth from the console for every necessary change. Others require a foot pedal as the beam regulator, which introduces another wire and tripping hazard. The most efficient and versatile technologies, however, offer a finger switch on the handpiece.
The K-Laser’s handpiece is equipped with a fingerswitch with THREE MODES of functionality:
Single Touch
Double Touch
Power Remote Control (PRC) which enables the user to increase or decrease the power output remotely through the handpiece without even stopping the treatment or going back to the touch-screen.
This is useful when both hands are occupied: for example, if using one hand to hold a body part, the other to hold the handpiece, and you need to change the power setting.
Also, the finger switch can be used to “Click OK” when dismissing a warning or when progressing through a treatment for the second time.
Different ailments are better treated using different power, wavelength, frequency and treatment time settings, and so the technical versatility of the machine needs to be matched by a software platform that allows a simple way to identify and select the most appropriate settings.
Some clinicians find their own protocols more effective than the pre-sets available or have conditions not included in those pre-sets. Accordingly, the best laser software platforms offer user-defined programs to be entered, saved, and logged. The K-Series offers such input capabilities, equipped with patient log files to further expedite the treatment process, so that if John Doe comes in twice a month for lower lumbar treatment, for example, then he would have his own file that not only tracks the power, wavelength, frequency, and treatment time settings, but also the number and date of his prior treatments.
The K-Series has room for up to 120 user-defined protocols that you can assign to new treatments as well as to individual patients. What’s MORE is each of these protocols come with up to 500 entries into a history log file. This data can then be exported to an Excel file via our USB drive (see section on Upgradeability) and entered seamlessly into your patient management system. The log file can then be reset to empty and you can start populating it again immediately.
Technology, as a rule, is always growing and equipment becomes obsolete. It is important to buy a device that will grow with you, or that you know never outlive its purpose. Hardware upgrades, whether it be power increase, frequency expansion, or fiber-optic evolution, are unavoidable on the time scale of decades, regardless of the starting point. Knowing the limits of the device, however, can keep you from having to take a middle step in your hardware upgrades. For example, average power densities above 20 W/cm2 will only be used for surgical applications because such high densities will ablate tissue. If you are using the laser for pain relief or biostimulation, you know you will never need a laser over a certain power rating and so it is a safe bet that if you purchase one that delivers 10-15 W/cm2, you will never have to upgrade your hardware.
Software, however, evolves much faster and so it is important to choose a laser whose software platform is readily expandable. Some companies offer upgrades if you send your machine back to them, but this brings about mandatory dead-time and shipping charges that take time away from your patients. Remote upgradeability is a MUST
Our new ZOOM HANDPIECE with STEEL-CLAD FIBER fiber is now available on all new K-Series and retrofit for all existing K-Series as well as previous 6D, 10D, and Studio models. The heart of the fiber is a 400-micron fiber optic providing optimal transmission and flexibility. This optic is then encased in a Kevlar (that’s right, the same material used to make BULLET-PROOF VESTS) sheath, which protects against lateral damage as well as prevents the act of pulling on the cord from pulling apart the fiber. THEN then entire ensemble (along with the electric wires that control the finger switch) is wrapped in a STEEL CLADDING for even more support. Combine this with the unique, industry leading zoom handpiece that ensures accurate treatment and power densities, and you are left with yet another example of our Evo-teK commitment, ensuring customers an upgrade path on evolving technology.
Some people think that bigger is better. NOT SO with fiber-optics. Not only is optical efficiency optimized, but so is flexibility. In fact, the bending radius (labeled “a” in the figure to the right) is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the fiber optic radius (labeled “b”). This means that a thinner fiber is able to bend more without breaking.
