December always heralds an issue of The Ophthalmologist that’s devoted to innovation, and this month’s has everything from genes to John Marshall. John talks about “flash-to-bang time” – the time it takes for an idea to become essential to the community at large. But the article immediately after John’s is Christos Bergeles’, which details how light field imaging (LFI) is maturing to the point where it can be used in surgical microscopy – and how its advantages (aberration, blur and reflection removal, refocusing after the event, and enhanced three-dimensional imaging) should transform both how surgeons (and surgical robots) work, and what they can achieve during a procedure. But what is LFI’s flash-to-bang time? There’s no commercial product yet, but the counter’s running at 99 years now. The first camera to exploit the principles of LFI was conceived by Marie Curie’s PhD supervisor, Gabriel Lippmann in 1908, and the first paper to describe the light field was published in 1936. However, there was no refocusing after the event back in those days.
Practical LFI was unlocked by two things: digital photography (conceived, 1961; first prototype, 1975), and the relentless progression of computing power that’s required to render the final image. It was the then Stanford University PhD student Ren Ng that married them together in his PhD thesis that he submitted in 2006. He went on to commercialize the technology the same year by founding the light field camera company, Lytro, and it was six years later (in 2012) when the first customers received the original Lytro LFI camera. Was there a “bang” in 2012? For consumers; not really – perhaps the fuse is still burning on that one. Pro photographers mostly kept buying their digital SLRs; consumers started to rely more and more on their smartphones for most of their photo-taking needs (as they do a good enough job most of the time). Apple introduced iPhones with dual lens setups that incorporate some of the principles of LFI (but really only for making an artificial bokeh at the back of portrait photographs) – but we’re a long way away from a LFI camera in a smartphone. For medical applications, though, I think the “bang” will come sooner. Newton stood “on the shoulders of giants” – and it’s rare that any innovation doesn’t rely on the lessons or the principles of prior art. Ophthalmology is an area of medicine where it seems that new drugs, devices and diagnostic instruments are being released almost constantly. But remember those pioneers that went before, who performed the first experiments, came up with the initial theory, and everyone that worked on it ever since. Each new product owes a debt to those people – and in some cases, that debt can stretch back by centuries.
Mark Hillen
Editor
