During the first half of the 20th century, pediatricians generally believed that children's eye problems were largely self-corrective that a child would grow out of his or her crossed eyes or poor vision. But they were wrong.

Unless a vision problem is detected and corrected early, the child will have vision problems in that eye for the rest of his or her life. Subsequent studies have shown that 2% to 5% of preschool children have vision problems, many of them not apparent.

In the late 1940s, a small group of physicians began to recognize this problem. One of them was Dr. Leonard Apt, a pediatrician who spent most of his career at UCLA. "During my pediatric training, I would request a consultation for a baby who was having a vision problem and the ophthalmologists would ask, 'How do you get information from a baby?'" he said. "That's when I realized I could adapt my pediatric techniques to ophthalmology."

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Apt stepped aside from his pediatric work and learned ophthalmology, becoming the first person to have a fellowship in pediatric ophthalmology at the National Institutes of Health and the first physician to be board-certified in both pediatrics and ophthalmology. At UCLA, he established the first division of pediatric ophthalmology at a U.S. medical school and was one of the five founders of the Jules Stein Eye Institute.

Apt died Friday at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center after a brief illness, the university announced. He was 90.

Innovations pioneered by Apt saved the eyesight of hundreds of thousands if not millions of children. "He was truly one of a kind," said his colleague Dr. Sherwin Isenberg of UCLA.

Apt is probably best known for the Apt test, developed while he was a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School in the early 1950s. When a pregnant woman exhibits vaginal bleeding or a newborn infant has bloody stools or vomitus, it is crucial to determine whether the blood belongs to mother or child.

Apt developed a simple test to distinguish between the two types of blood, focusing on hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying portion of blood. Fetal hemoglobin has a slightly different composition than that of adult hemoglobin and is substantially more resistant to degradation by a base, such as sodium hydroxide.

The Apt test involves isolating hemoglobin from a small amount of blood, then exposing it to sodium hydroxide and examining it under a microscope. If the hemoglobin then appears pinkish, it is from the fetus; if it is yellowish-brown, it is from the mother. The Apt test "was a major breakthrough," Isenberg said. It is still widely used, but it is being supplanted by a newer test that determines proportions of fetal and maternal blood.

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Leonard Apt dies; UCLA pediatric ophthalmologist was 90