John Black 1

John F. Black, B.Sc., Ph.D.
Bus. Phone: 650.274.2081
Mobile:  

CNSV Member

IEEE Senior Member

Medical devices, image-guided surgery, optical coherence tomography (OCT), fluorescence, biomedical optics, custom laser design and development, fiber optics, non-linear optics, spectroscopy, IP.

John Black 2


Bainbridge Island, WA 98110
USA

Principal optical engineer and optical system architect for the first OCT-guided therapeutic surgical procedure in humans and the first and second OCT-guided intravascular treatments of atherosclerosis in humans.

My areas of expertise include medical device design and development, laser/tissue interaction, imaging therapeutic catheter design, design and development of medical imaging and illumination devices, directed energy devices, tissue optics and spectroscopy, laser design and manufacture, fiber lasers, OCT, development of instrumentation, preclinical studies and clinical pilot trials.

I have been involved at all levels of medical device development and translation to the clinical including the Quality System Requirement, pre-clinical and pilot clinical studies.

My particular interests are in the application of lasers, fiber optics, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and fluorescence spectroscopy (FS) in image-guided therapeutic surgical procedures. My major achievements have been the development of a novel two-color laser system for the treatment of cutaneous vascular lesions and being the principal optical engineer and optical system architect for the first OCT-guided therapeutic surgical procedure in humans and the first and second OCT-guided intravascular treatments of atherosclerosis in humans. The Nighthawk™ was capable of recovering the plaque from the vessel without embolization, making it the only device then capable of taking an intravascular image-guided biopsy sample.

My contributions in the fields of laser development and medical device capital equipment have included novel lasers for airborne sensing of CO2 with possible applications to capnography, novel lasers for RGB projectors, and an industry leading mode locked ultraviolet laser. At Lightwave Electronics I researched and developed new diode-pumped rare-earth-doped fiber lasers for blue and green wavelengths which were incorporated into SONY GLV™ RGB projectors shown at the 2005 Expo in Aichi, Japan. After this I designed the resonator and non-linear optical stages in the XcyteTM diode-pumped mode-locked UV laser for flow cytometry now with >> 1000 units in the field.

I designed a solid-state deep ultraviolet (UV-C) laser (250 nm) based on a frequency tripled, pulsed alexandrite laser, designed to be the illumination source on endoscopes. We have successfully generated 14 mW of narrow linewidth, tunable DUV radiation with a pulse width and beam quality parameter suitable for launching into small core fibers, and we have recently used this source to image ex-vivo epithelial-origin carcinogenesis in surgical discard samples.


          John Black 3