ABSTRACT
As recently as 1988 it was possible for the late Pal Greguss, a distinguished researcher, to suggest in a published paper1 that although holography had potential in medical education, there was little future for it in biomedical research, and next to none in clinical practice. To be fair, Greguss was defining holography in a very narrow way, and his paper in fact lists many obviously important applications that were at the time the subject of active research. For example, teams such as Wedendal and Bjelkhagen2, and Ho¨k et al.3, had already carried out valuable work in general physiology; Dermaut and Boone4 had reported the possible uses of holographic interferometry in pathology, and Zhou5 had pioneered the holographic visualization of CT scans in three dimensions.
