Fiber-optic Sensing: Chirped FBGs measure thermal gradients for biomedical applications

Applications such as medical laser thermal ablation and photodynamic or thermo therapies are more effective when there is a real-time spatial understanding of the thermal energy delivered to biological tissue as a function of tissue depth. Using chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG) fiber-optic sensors, researchers from Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan), Universita Campus Bio-Medico di Roma (Rome, Italy), Politecnico di Torino (Torino, Italy), the Institute of Image-Guided Surgery (IHU; Strasbourg, France), the Research Centre of Frascati (Rome, Italy), and the University of Naples Parthenope (Naples, Italy) have developed a new technique that can resolve submillimeter-scale temperature patterns and estimate temperature gradients to advance a variety of thermal biomedical applications