Josef F. Bille - High Resolution Imaging in Microscopy and Ophthalmology: New Frontiers in Biomedical Optics

It was December 1991. The annual meeting of the American Glaucoma Society was taking place at the Hotel del Coronado, just south of San Diego. It was the fourth meeting of the Society that had been founded just several years earlier. And it was just 8 months after opening the Shiley Eye Center in La Jolla at the University of California San Diego, approximately 25 miles north of the meeting site. There was a surprising brief rain shower early that evening in San Diego, and a bus filled with 38 glaucoma colleagues was in transit to La Jolla. They had heard rumors for more than 1 year that there was a new medical imaging device that would enable quantitative and objective imaging of the optic nerve head. Moreover, it would soon be available at a reasonable cost and it would provide for practical patient testing in the office. I am told that those on the bus were excited because many of them thought that they might be viewing the future of glaucoma management. I had lectured and published on optic disc imaging, and hoped that our demonstration would justify the funding of a National Eye Institute grant that I had received several years earlier to study this technology, and validate much of what we had been doing. At the Shiley Eye Center, there was anxiety among almost all of those who had done research or developed the technology over the preceding few years. However, there was one individual who sat on the side, just near the front window, waiting for the bus. He was smoking one cigarette after the other and had his usual smile.

Actually, the idea for imaging the optic disc and retinal nerve fiber layer was not new. Several other technologies had been tested and employed, but never gained traction. Just a few years before the eventful December 1991 demonstration, a commercial confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope (the Laser Tomographic Scanner (LTS) by Heidelberg Instruments) had been developed and commercialized by the brilliant Josef Bille and his team of engineers and students. At that time, Josef spent increasing amounts of time with us at UCSD and on many of his visits he was accompanied by his students. Uniformly, they were all hardworking, clever, and serious about their work. It was around that time that I first met Gerhard Zinser. Gerhard stood out among the many graduate and postdoctoral students that came to work with Josef and us in San Diego. Not only was he the brightest star, but he was collaborative, insightful, visionary, and just a wonderfully warm person. Ask him a technical question and there always was a thoughtful and comprehensible response. In discussions in the laboratory and also in restaurants (where he would opine over his steak and potatoes and postprandial cigarettes), we spent hours discussing how this technology could be applied to both the optic disc and macula. So many of those hours, we spent just discussing reference planes and analyses.