The firsts in ophthalmic echography

Summary Clinical ophthalmic ultrasound began with the A‐scan. The most recognized early pioneer in this field was a Finnish ophthalmologist Dr. Arvo Oksala (1920–1993), later Professor and Chair of the Turku University Eye Clinic. He began to explore ultrasound with the physicist Antti Lehtinen in 1957, a year after the first paper on this topic written by Mundt and Hughes. Oksala and Lehtinen used an industrial ultrasound from a large metal company. The same year they published their first results: detection of non‐metallic foreign bodies, retinal detachments and tumors in the eye. Further work allowed differentiation between a subretinal haemorrhage and a choroidal tumor. Together these two investigators published 23 papers on ophthalmic ultrasound within the first 5 years. From 1968 to 1971, prof. Oksala was the President of the Societas Internationalis pro Diagnostica Ultrasonica in Ophthalmologia (SIDUO) that had been founded in 1964, and in 1971 he became its Honorary Member and in 1984 he received its Pioneer Award. The second recipient of the Pioneer Award in 1984 was Dr. Gilbert Baum (1922–2002) from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. He was the primary developer of the B‐scan technique to examine the human eye.