InnovaQuartz LLC

15/02/2026

This is Prometheus. It's designed for braking up large urinary stones found in the ureter and bladder. Such stones typically eat laser fibers for lunch, meaning the efficiency of the surgery falls off rapidly because the fiber tips get damaged rapidly. Most folks attribute this damage to flying stone fragments. I am not so sure that's right, but if it is, this fiber will last a lot longer than the ones used today.

Normal fiber tips are 'cleaved'-- they are scored and snap cut, leaving a sharp edge and relatively flat surface. Both are easily chipped by flying stone debris. These tips are also usually 0.6 mm in diameter, although some are as large as 1 mm but the bigger fibers cost a boat load of money. (I know, I make some of them.)

Prometheus tips are 1.2 mm in diameter but the fiber is only 0.6 mm, so right there we have the robustness of the largest fiber available -- plus some -- at the cost of the smaller fiber. That won't matter if it's toast in 5 minutes like regular fibers, though, so I made it with a focusing lens that allows working a few millimeters away from the stone. The round profile adds to the resistance against damage from fragments, too, deflecting some and eliminating any sharp edges that are easily chipped.

I think it's going to be a winner for large stones, particularly coupled with our new thulium laser. We did a stone case with the laser the other day -- a 4 cm diameter staghorn stone -- and finished in 45 minutes with a regular 0.6 mm fiber. Thulium lasers don't usually do very well with large stones...this one did as well as a holmium.

24/12/2025

We're making our new thulium fiber lasers in small numbers as we finish equipping our new laser manufacturing facility in Phoenix to be operated by Trimedyne (Trimedyne is a wholly owned affiliate of InnovaQuartz). This is the first one being shipped to a customer.

24/12/2025

Take a 3-D tour of the president’s office, where he covered more than a third of wall space with gold.

02/12/2025

Scientists are finally studying the important stuff, eh?

29/11/2025

The idiocracy bleats anew…

Vinay Prasad, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, said his team concluded that coronavirus shots were linked to children’s deaths, necessitating a new approach.

21/11/2025

Our next product will be fibers terminated with these caps. We call them HaloFibers (trademark) because the energy comes out in a ring at 90 degrees to the fiber axis. Think of it as a a laser rotorooter for arteries and veins, clearing out cholesterol plaques being the ultimate goal. This large model (2 mm) is destined for prostate surgery -- low hanging fruit versus endovascular surgery.

This product is covered by one or more US patents.

05/05/2025

A 1.00 (+/- 0.01) millimeter diameter 'window' on a 0.273 mm core, Si/Si fiber is pictured.

It is unique, non-obvious and useful, i.e., it's patented. You may ask why that is. Others have welded windows on fibers for decades, after all.

Yet this structure has no weld and the window is clad with fluorine doped silica at 1.08 CCDR on the 1.1 CCDR fiber (Cladding to Core Diameter Ratio). Not only that, the input face is laser polished for an insanely high laser damage threshold and may be equipped with curvatures. (This one is a concave input surface for collimating converging laser foci, for example.)

The OD tolerance of the 'window' is +/- 1%. The distance between the original core and the input face may be maintained to +/- 0.025mm. Finally, the upper left inset shows that we can put these on both ends of a fiber, with the same lens or with different lenses.

info@innovaquartz.com

steve@innovaquartz.com

24/03/2025

Wildlife Photographer Of The Year has been won by amateur photographer

An amateur photographer from the UK has won a prestigious Wildlife Photographer Of The Year award 🏆 ⁠
⁠
Nima Sarikhani captured the image of a sleeping polar bear on an iceberg off Norway's Svalbard archipelago.⁠
⁠
The picture, titled Ice Bed, has been crowned the winner of the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer Of The Year people's choice award, after being whittled down to a shortlist of 25 …

25/10/2020

Interferometric image captured by Dr. Jason Guth, our VP for R&D.
Pretty cool, eh?

13/10/2020

Well, there is patent number 34...and my first "Design Patent". A design patent is what one gets when the concept lacks novelty but has utility: that is, it's a good idea but not completely new. It's a bit difficult to explain...this device can be used in a surgical theater to reprocess a laser surgical fiber optic with precision and ease.

Nothing like it exists on the market, but because other ways to reprocessing optical fiber in the OR are commonly known, and since devices making it impossible to screw-up the reprocessing are also known, even if totally impossible to use in and OR, the combination of ideas is "obvious" and cannot be patented, but the SHAPE of the the thing can be, so I patented the shape.

06/10/2020

Boston Scientific is a multi-billion dollar corporation that happens to own 16 of my earlier patents. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at learning how to actually MAKE my devices so they're having some overheating issues and went to a South Korean university for help in solving them. That work produced this little contribution to the Optical Society of America's journal. It's interesting work, but I must say that we at IQ did this a decade or more ago and found a better solution and patented that...

The letter is interesting in another way, though...the illustration used exposes at least six patented features of my device...yet no credit is give to us, the originators of this technology, not even in the references. I wonder if we intimidate they by being a decade or more ahead of them...