What makes it so precise to affect a specific space along the line? Wouldn’t it just burn through you with same intensity along the entire “line”?
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Well it depends what kind of treatment we’re talking about.
In cancer treatments, stereotactic radio surgery takes multiple laser beams from different angles and points them all at the designated area, like a tumor. Each individual beam isn’t very strong and doesn’t do much damage to the tissues as it passes through them, but as the multiple lasers come together their power output at the intersection basically multiples. Now you have this area of high power radiation that can now damage the tissue, but since multiple lasers need to overlap for this to happen you can basically treat the body like an x,y,z coordinate grid. And unless they intersect there’s insignificant damage to the rest of the body.
In something like LASIK eye surgery, a single laser is focused through a lens and is controlled using a precise robot to only cut where necessary, in this case, it’s not using a gamma radiation laser like the other example, but literally like focused laser light. This light however is designed to only focus at a certain distance and can only cut so far in its effective range. This is actually a problem in some cases because If your corneas are too thin, the laser can cut too far, so this would exclude you from getting this treatment, on the other hand for many others, the laser is barely strong enough to cut through the outer layer making it safe and much easier to perform than a surgeon trying to do so by hand.
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