Illumination – Light fiber – rod – or pipe – With filter device
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-14
2003-02-04
O'Shea, Sandra (Department: 2875)
Illumination
Light fiber, rod, or pipe
With filter device
C362S033000, C362S804000, C362S807000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06513962
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention generally relates to an illumination system. This illumination system is especially, though not exclusively, intended for use in surgical lighting in operating rooms and ambulatory surgical suites. This invention also relates to certain components which are used in the illumination system of the invention but which may also be useful in other types of optical systems and applications.
For decades, illumination systems for operating rooms have posed major problems. To ensure the safety of patients, it is essential that an illumination system provide intense and acceptably uniform illumination over the entire surgical site, which can in some cases, be of substantial width and depth as, for example in open heart surgery. Obviously, the surgery cannot be interrupted should a bulb burn out, and thus each lighting unit needs either multiple bulbs or at least a back-up bulb which will illuminate should a primary bulb fail. Also, large area systems need at least two, and preferably three or more, lighting units to ensure that light can impinge upon the surgical site from multiple directions so that no part of the surgical site is in complete shadow even when it is necessary for operating room personnel to be positioned between the surgical site and one of the lighting units. The lighting units must also be suspended so that they can be moved and rotated in all directions to provide optimum illumination of the surgical site, the size and shape of which may change during a surgical procedure.
Lighting units containing multiple high output bulbs sufficiently powerful to produce the intense lighting needed for surgery or to meet code redundancy requirements are necessarily of substantial depth and weight. To enable such large heavy lighting units to be moved by operating room personnel without requiring undue force, it is essential in practice to provide some form of counterpoise system, and the presence of the counterpoise system further increases the size and weight of the lighting units.
Conventional surgical lighting systems have other disadvantages. The powerful lamps used, which each typically comprise a bulb and a reflector, generate large amounts of heat and infra-red radiation. The heat is dissipated into the operating room, thus increasing the load on the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems thereof, and is also radiated on to operating room personnel, increasing their fatigue during lengthy procedures. Since the infra-red radiation generated follows the same path as the visible light, it is thus largely absorbed at the surgical site, within the patient's tissues. This radiation absorption by the patient's tissues tends to damage the tissues, especially during lengthy procedures, and generally increases the trauma to the patient resulting from the operation.
It is also essential that the illumination produced by the system conform to a standard of color to ensure that tissues, blood, blood vessels, and the like. all retain their normal appearance, since any deviation from expected colors of body parts increases the risk of a surgeon mistakenly identifying a body part and thus operating incorrectly. In practice, a surgical illumination system must produce light with a proper correlated color temperature (“CCT”, which is defined as the absolute temperature of a black body whose chromaticity most nearly resembles that of the light source) and a proper color rendering index (“CRI”, which is defined as the average color shift, under illumination by a test source, of a series of eight standard colors of intermediate saturation spread throughout the range of hues, with respect to a reference source).
The need to maintain accurate CCT and CRI values presents problems when it is necessary to control the output of surgical lighting systems. Conventionally, light intensity has been controlled by varying the energy input to each lamp. However, all types of high output lamps undergo some change in their output spectrum as their energy input is varied, thus changing the CCT and CRI of the output. In practice, this tends to result in an unsatisfactory compromise since the usable intensity range is reduced and the resultant changes in CCT and CRI, though tolerable, are greater than is strictly desirable.
Attempts have been made to avoid the aforementioned longstanding disadvantages of conventional surgical lighting systems using lamps carried within lighting heads disposed inside the operating room. In particular, inventors have realized that fiber optic technology, which permits light from a remote source to be channeled through a bundle of optical fibers to a location where the light is needed, allows the development of surgical lighting systems in which the actual light sources may be outside the operating room and the light is fed to the surgical site via optical fiber bundles. Such a fiber optic based system renders the light sources accessible to technicians should a light source fail during an operation, and eases the problem of maintaining the lighting heads aseptic, since the lighting heads no longer need to contain bulbs and reflectors of complex shape. Also, the lighting heads themselves could be made smaller and lighter, thus avoiding the need for elaborate counterpoising systems. Finally, the removal of the light sources from the operating room also removes the unwanted heat generated within the operating room by conventional lighting systems.
Most proposals for use of fiber optic based lighting systems within operating rooms relate to so-called “surgical headlamps”, that is to say, lighting systems which provide light adjacent a surgeon's face for illumination of a surgical site very close to the face, as required in microsurgery, for example, eye or ear surgery. Examples of such surgical headlamp systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,516,190; 5,355,285; 5,430,620; and 5,709,459. However, at least one fiber optic based system has been proposed to replace the main conventional lighting system of an operating room; see U.S. Pat. No. 5,497,295 (Gehly),
FIG. 5
et seq. In the Gehly system, the light sources are disposed within a separate room outside the operating room. Light from these sources is led via a plurality of optic fiber bundles (one bundle for each lighting head used within the operating room) into the operating room via a central hub installed in the ceiling thereof. Beneath this central hub are mounted two substantially cylindrical rotatable members having a common vertical axis. Each of the rotatable members carries a horizontal arm which extends outwardly from the rotatable member parallel to the ceiling of the operating room. A carriage is slidably mounted on each horizontal arm so as to be movable along the length of the arm, and each carriage supports a three-segment telescopic vertical column which descends from the carriage. A shallow, dish-shaped lighthead is mounted via a flexible coupling on the bottom of each telescopic column. Each of the fiber bundles entering the operating room via the central hub is led via one of the cylindrical rotatable members on to one of the horizontal arms (each arm carries only one fiber bundle) and down the associated column and flexible coupling to the center of the associated lighthead, where the light impinges upon a substantially conical central section of the lighthead, which deflects it on to a plurality of annular diffusers which surround the conical central section.
The horizontal arm/carriage/telescopic column/flexible coupling/ light-head structure described in Gehly is of considerable complexity, size and weight, so that the arms, carriages and columns appear to require powered operation (with inevitable problems should any part of the complex mechanical structure fail to operate correctly during the course of a surgical procedure), and the whole structure is probably as intrusive in an operating room as conventional lighting heads containing bulbs. Furthermore, the fiber bundles in Gehly extend unbroken from adjacent the light sources t
Boulant Benoit
Brukilacchio Thomas J.
DiCarlo Brain James
Elterman Paul B.
Mayshack Alvin C.
Caufield Francis J.
Getinge/Castle, Inc.
O'Shea Sandra
Ton Anabel
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