How to tell if an object has been hit with a Line Renderer

I am working on a game where a laser is shot from a gun. I am using a line renderer to display the laser. Is there a way to detect if an object has been hit with the line renderer?

If you are just using two points, the easiest thing to do is to use a Physics.Raycast() or a LineCast(). If you are looking for something more substantial such as detecting when a person walks into the beam, here are a couple of posts that might be interesting:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/285040/draw-a-line-in-game.html

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/418759/how-might-i-go-about-making-a-trail-render-that-de.html