Galway is on the beam

Description

Description piece about the reserach ongoing in the National Centre for Laser Applications back in 1997.

Subject

It is probably not very well known, even by the people who have them, that breast implants have product information etched somewhere on their surface. For obvious reasons, manufacturers, regulators and recipients would prefer not to introduce ink into human bodies, so an alternative means of marking the product has to be found.

Enter the National Centre for Laser Applications in Galway. "With the amount of product innovation that's going on in the medical-device arena at the moment, there's a lot of process innovation too - often there's a laser route which would do the job more efficiently," says Tony Flaherty, research scientist with the NCLA.

"The advantage of the laser is that there is no contact with the device, so you can actually do the work in a sterile environment or under high temperatures or low temperatures," says his colleague Dr Alan Ryder, also a research scientist. "When you have no contact, you're not introducing anything extraneous into your medical device, which for the approval bodies makes it safer and quicker to grant approval."