Abstrakt
It is known that UV-C radiation kills fungus by radiating their DNA. We wanted to verify, if we could use radiation produced by excimer laser as an alternative method for the treatment of onychomycosis – nail fungus.
Medical procedure like this should meet certain conditions such as perfectly and reliably destroying the fungi and to make no harm to the patient (in this case overheating of the under-nail tissue). The main part of the first stage of this work was to determine the coefficients for transmission, reflection and absorption of nails to determine the quantity of energy going through and absorbed by the nail – that means quantity of energy which could harm the healthy tissue.
In the following stage we focused on the irradiation of the fungi. Our final task was to assess whether is it possible to determine the parameters of the radiation (total dose, dose per pulse frequency, repetition rate andnumber of pulses) for which the elimination of the fungi would be most effective without damaging the nail and the soft tissue underneath it.
The results so far have proven that UV-C radiation doesnot pass through a fingernail to such extent that it could damage the soft tissue beneath it. We've measured the absorption and transmission spectrum for the nail tissue at the first time and we've determined the value of absorption coefficient is α = 1.7 mm at the wavelength of 700 nm (transmission max.).
Fungi are destroyed by the application of small doses of radiation using the excimer laser. The goal of the last phase of our work was to determine the modulation parameters of the excimer laser radiation for the treatment of onychomycosis.
Refining the parametersand finding out the optimal values for different ranges and types of illnesses will require additional measurements.