| Steris Corp., www.steris.com |
Engineers at Steris Corp., Mentor, Ohio, have designed a new lighting system for operating rooms that combines the output of 84 LEDs into a 160,000-lux spot. Each LED is phosphor coated and emits only pure white light that won’t cause color fringing or the rainbow effects associated with multicolored bulbs. The light has a color-rendering index of 97, so surgeons see tissues in undistorted colors. The light also has an index for deep, saturated red colors of R9 which lets operating-room staff see many different shades of red.
To eliminate shadows, Steris manufactures the 84 tightly fitting lenses that make up the light head using diamond tooling accurate to 1 millionth of an inch. Surgeons can adjust the intensity, along with spot size and location, using a single control protruding from the center of the lamp.
The LEDs emit 34% less beam heat than traditional OR lights which helps keeps the surgical staff cool while reducing the risk of drying out the patient’s exposed tissues. The lamp also consumes one-third less energy than traditional lights. And it is rated for 30,000 hr or about 10 to 15 years of use.
The lamps hang from articulated arms with ultraglide bearings, so they move easily but will not drift or bounce. To accommodate the latest video technology in the OR, the Harmony lighting system can be expanded to hold several high-definition monitors or cameras and is wired to accept a host of video signals that include DVI, HD-SDI, Composite, S-Video, Components, RGBHV, and RGBS. These signals are routed over low-loss, high-definition fiber optics.