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HL20: George Berci, MD—Seeing a Better Way

 |  By cclark@healthleadersmedia.com  
   December 13, 2011

In our annual HealthLeaders 20, we profile individuals who are changing healthcare for the better. Some are longtime industry fixtures; others would clearly be considered outsiders. Some are revered; others would not win many popularity contests. All of them are playing a crucial role in making the healthcare industry better. This is the story of George Berci, MD.

This profile was published in the December, 2011 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

 "I thought it would be nice to be able to put something in there that would let you could see and remove the stones."

In the late 1950s, Hungarian George Berci, MD, was in Melbourne, Australia, on a Rockefeller Fellowship, vexed with a major problem in gall bladder procedures. Surgeons could not see inside the common bile duct well enough to remove the stones.

"The stones were overlooked, and approximately 12% of patients had to undergo another procedure to remove them," he recalls. "I thought it would be nice to insert something in the duct that would let you remove the stones under visual control."

Berci sought help from a London physicist and they developed a rod-lens system that vastly improved the visual field for this procedure, and according to a paper in the journal Surgical Endoscopy, "transformed the quality of endoscopic instrumentation for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in many specialties."

"The great advantage was the optic was much brighter, enlarged image. The light was much brighter. And the optic had much greater quality of the image regarding sharpness and viewing angle," he says.

That was just one of many technical advances Berci has brought to the field of instrumentation in laparoscopy and several other endoscopy procedures during his career. 

Over the decades, he has continually found ways to improve illumination of the endoscope, enhancing the clarity of what could be seen by applying a high-intensity, miniature xenon arc globe, a strategy that had been in use by the military.

He helped develop ways to televise surgeries so that physicians were better able to teach medical students how to perform procedures. "We developed the first miniature endoscopic TV camera in 1962." First black and white followed by color with better resolution. "This was a great step," he says, “because you obtain a magnified image instead of observing it through a small eye piece.”

His innovations helped develop numerous surgical instruments, including cytoscopes, resectoscopes, and nephroscopes. Urologists in particular, he says, were able to perform surgeries much more safely with the resectoscope.

He was involved in development of a better instruments used in laparoscopy, for use in both adults and children. The instruments got smaller, and the optics got smaller, and Berci was involved in many improvements.

The son of the assistant conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Berci was headed, for a time, for a career in music. At age 4 his father insisted that he play the fiddle. "I played well as a kind of wonder child, until about age 11, and allegedly I could have been somebody," Berci jokes.

Perhaps Berci could look at the healing arts with a device builder’s eye because that's how he began his training, as a mechanical engineer.

Berci stopped performing surgery 20 years ago, but at age 90 continues as the senior director of the Endoscopic Research Laboratory at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he has worked since 1970. 

These days, Berci isn't relaxing with the benefits of a lifetime of discovery.

He goes in every day around 6:30 a.m., he says. "I run around the hospital," even sometimes taking the stairs to quickly get up and down the building's four floors to help active surgeons to observe new procedures, using new modern video endoscopes.

He's still at it, researching and writing, and he has several new projects. One is to find ways to improve method of intubating patients with difficult airway passages and another is to improve methods to make the field of microsurgical procedures easier and improve teaching.

"I also like to teach, and I'm very happy that I still can teach," he says.


This article appears in the December 2011 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

 

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