Apparatus and method for soft tissue ablation employing high power diode-pumped laser

A surgical apparatus for laser ablation of soft tissue, comprising:

• a laser operated at highly multiple modes and producing an output laser beam of 40 W or higher, said laser including:
• a resonant optical cavity;
• a gain medium deposited in said resonant optical cavity;
• a plurality of pump radiation sources configured to pump said gain medium from two or more directions;
• a Q-switch deposited in said resonant cavity and being operable at a repetition rate within 1 kHz to 100 kHz;
• a frequency-doubling crystal deposited in said resonant cavity to receive radiation emitted by said gain medium;
• and
• a mode control mechanism implemented in said resonant cavity and ensuring highly multiple modes to operate, wherein a beam spot size at said gain medium is at least five times as big as a minimum beam spot size associated with TEM00 mode operation;
• an optical fiber configured to output radiation from the apparatus onto soft tissue to ablate the soft tissue;
• and
• a beam divergence controller configured to receive radiation output from said resonant optical cavity, and to output the received radiation to the optical fiber, wherein the beam divergence controller processes the radiation received from said resonant optical cavity prior to outputting the received radiation to the optical fiber such that the beam divergence angle of the radiation output from the optical fiber to said soft tissue is reduced.