Professor Khodadoust and his sign

Abstract

Professor Ali Asghar Khodadoust was a pioneer and innovative corneal transplant surgeon with international reputation. He was born in Shiraz, Iran, in October 1935 where he later founded the Khodadoust eye hospital in 2003. He studied Medicine at Shiraz university and went to the United States of America (USA) in 1959 to continue his medical education. While in America, he did extensive research into corneal transplantation and rejection and was the first to describe the endothelial rejection sign which was named after him as the “Khodadoust line”. It separates the immunologically damaged endothelium from unaffected endothelium in cornea and represents transplant rejection. Dr Khodadoust completed his fellowship training at Wimer Eye Institute at Hopkins and was later involved in establishing an exchange program between Shiraz university in Iran and Hopkins university in the USA which ran between 1968 and 1979. He was a faculty member of Yale and John Hopkins universities in the USA. Dr Khodadoust was honoured as a national treasure to Iran in a ceremony organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Shiraz in 2015. He died in New York, USA, in March 2018 aged 82.His life, works and achievements, will be presented in this lecture.