Laser Hazards and Ocular Exposure Analysis and Protection

Abstract:
In this paper, different lasers such as ruby, Argon, Nd:Y AG, He 􀃭Ne, and CO2 are used
to expose the eyes of rabbits as a simulation of the human eyes accidental laser
exposure. Quantitative irradiance causing threshold damage (lesion) in as a function of
wavelength under different pulse durations is studied. The retinal damage studies have
shown that the threshold retinal damage decreases as increasing the exposure time. Our
results also showed that the retinal sensitivity to threshold damage decreases as
increasing the wavelength under different pulse duration. The basis of the physical and
analytical models used to predict and analyze the laser hazards and their effect on the
eye are presented. The proposed physical and analytical models include the
representation of the laser and the eye characteristics are used for predicting the
radiometric aspects and calculating the overall laser intensity exposing the eye. Other
parameters that impact the evaluation such as atmospheric attenuation, laser
wavelength, and divergence angle are considered in the proposed model. The proposed
algorithm is used to predict many parameters such as hazardous distance, total incident
power on the eye and the reflectance of the proposed protection filter. The simulation
results of the proposed algorithm are in good agreement with the measurement results.