Lasers and Math Can Help Doctors Deliver Just the Right Amount of Medicine August 26, 2026 By: Henry Nonnemaker

https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/lasers-and-math-can-help-doctors-deliver-just-right-amount-medicine When doctors need to deliver precise doses of medicine on a strict schedule, they often administer it intravenously. Intravenous drug delivery methods need to carefully control the flow of medicine into a patient. Knowing the medicine’s flow rate — or the volume of fluid flowing into the patient each second or minute — is crucial to delivering the right amount of medicine at the right time. Surprisingly, the correct amount is sometimes not very much at all. Imagine a one-liter bottle divided up into a billion parts. One of those parts is a nanoliter. Doctors may only need a handful of nanoliters of fluid to flow each minute.