Page 51 - LASERS & IPLS IN MEDICAL/AESTHETIC APPLICATIONS

Chapter 1 – Fundamentals of Medical/Aesthetic Lasers and IPLs v1.1
Then, when you think you are driving along a road at 50 km/hour, you may actually be moving at 60 km/hour!! If you are in a 50 km/h zone, you might get a ticket from your local police officers.
When you get into the car, you naturally assume that the speedometer is going to give you the correct readings. But, it can only do this if it has been calibrated properly. This means that, soon after it was manufactured, it was tested so that the numbers on the dial made sense.
This is the calibration process - if your speedometer is not properly calibrated then the numbers are completely meaningless!
Figure 25: A typical calibration chart for a laser
The same applies to lasers and IPLs. If they have not been properly calibrated then you will have no idea what is actually being fired at the skin – not good!!
What do we need to know, to calibrate a laser or IPL? Well, first you need an appropriate energy or power meter to check the output of your device (note – different lasers usually require different meters. Your IPL may require a different meter again!) Then there are two measurements we need to take:
firstly, a set of energy readings which correspond to the user settings on the input panel of the device;
and secondly, the corresponding spot sizes for those energies.
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Chapter 1 LEVEL A Fundamentals of Lasers/IPLs
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