Ultrafast lasers are extremely promising tools for minimally-invasive orthopedic surgery, but the ablated volumes per pulse are low, so a high pulse frequency is necessary to reach practical ablation rates. The purpose of this work was to study in vitro the influence of the pulse repetition rate on the ablation rate, surface topography and surface composition of bone using of bovine cortical femur as a model. The tests were carried out by scanning the laser beam in relation to the sample, using pulse frequencies between 50 and 3000 Hz, scanning velocities from 0.5 to 10 mm/s and average pulse energy of 650 mu J. The experiments were performed in dry conditions and with water irrigation. The higher ablation rates were obtained at high scanning velocity without water irrigation but severe thermal effects such as resolidification, cracking and, eventually, carbonization occurred in these conditions due to heat accumulation in the tissue. Thermal damage was avoided for all the laser processing parameters ranges tested by using water cooling. The highest ablation rate achieved was 1.4 mm(3)/min for a scanning velocity of 10 mm/s at 2 kHz pulse repetition rate under water irrigation. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.