Neil Bressler, a professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Ophthalmology, has joined us as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. Below is the content of the interview conducted during the Future of Medicine Forum .

1 Could you please give us a brief introduction of yourself?

Neil Bressler, I'm a professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where I'm a retina specialist, and also interested in clinical trials, and we do research in government sponsored, foundation sponsored, industry sponsored, trials that answer major questions on preventing or treating retinal conditions around the world. I also serve as editor in chief of JAMA ophthalmology, which is one of our main ophthalmology journals also to reach to around the world.

2 How can Tsinghua University’s interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of ophthalmology contribute to advancing progress in this area?

We really think that it's all about people. You need a place where people talk with each other. If you have brilliant engineers, but they never talk to a physician who needs their work, that won't help. If you have the best surgeons in the world, but they never talk to people who will develop new devices or new medicines that they can use. You won't move forward as quickly. So Tsinghua Medicine is envisioning a way of having the best researchers work with the best clinicians. In that way, they talk to each other about what the problems are, they work together to test new ways of solving those, and then they can implement them and teach them around the world. So those are the principles that are being planned. And I look forward to seeing how it grows.

Probably by share publications of their findings is number one, that way, all scientists, all clinicians around the world can gain access to learning what is new. But it goes beyond just reporting scientific Information. You then have to figure out how to teach it, how to do this education. Fortunately, this university brings in a lot of great people from around the region. Hopefully, eventually it will bring the very best people from around the world, and also go to other universities and other academic centers and teach them the ways that you are learning here. So the idea is that you will not only have the very best science and the very best clinical research, but that you'll be able to implement that into the very best education. And that will then translate into probably the very best patient care.

3 Do you have any specific hopes for future collaborations with Tsinghua?

The hope is that by collaborating with people, not only throughout this university, but throughout the country and then throughout the world, you have an opportunity to have people who are working here, spend some time at other centers and learn the very best at those centers and share what they've learned here.

Then you have the opportunity to bring people from those other places to here. And when you do that, you build an education and a trust that then goes on to collaborative research projects where both groups are working on these projects together and you get the best of both worlds.

On top of that, you hope that either virtually or in person, you have education going on, where people from here can teach around with collaborators around the world, and where these international collaborators can then also teach the people here. Because that way you get the best of all centers. And this is the goal, I think, of Tsinghua Medicine to try to have this sort of collaboration where it's not all invented here. A lot of it's invented here, but it's also open to working with all the other places in the world where new knowledge is being formed, new education is being formed. And then what comes from that is great patient care.

4 How do you think medical researches can better guide clinical practice?

For example, just in JAMA ophthalmology. We had over 3.5 million articles downloaded or viewed last year. That's so much for ophthalmology but it's because the goal of the journal is to reach to many people around the world. These are great new tools, both big data, large language models, artificial intelligence, there are wonderful tools, just like when genetics came out, just like when bio-statistics came out. This is another tool, but they will only have relevance if we show that outcomes using them versus not using them are better. And I think we'll get there. So we've gone through the first phase of just developing the methodology. Great. It's exciting. But to move to the next step will require showing implementing those sort of techniques, artificial intelligence techniques in the clinical practice and show how does that change outcomes. And actually not just in the clinical practice, but through monitoring at home, through monitoring in the community. If you can show that that changes the outcomes for the better, then it will be great. Right now, we hope it will change the outcomes, but we need to test that and show how do we use these new methodologies in a way that improve somebody's risk of going blind, in a way that reduce heart disease, in a way that maybe allows fewer children to go on to become very highly myopic. So this is a great tool. It's been exciting, but we've just scratched the surface, and the next step will be to show how this really changes outcomes.

5 As the Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Ophthalmology, how do you view the role of medical publications in improving global healthcare quality？

JAMA ophthalmology is part of a network of specialty journals, which go under JAMA as a general medical journal, and then JAMA surgery, JAMA pediatrics, JAMA ophthalmology, and 11 others. These are really designed to take the most cutting edge, clinically relevant information, spread it around the world. The science has to be great. So it's often the most recent clinical trials that might change medicine. But it's not just about reporting the very best science. You also have to share that information in a way that clinicians around the world will understand it. This is done through various visual abstracts, through podcasts, through multimedia presentations. And so, it's a way of trying to involve everybody in the world in medicine while it's published in the United States. It's viewed by millions of people around the world.