Dr. George Berci, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who changed the way modern surgery is conducted by developing techniques and instruments that help doctors better see and treat the inside of the body while minimizing cutting, died on Aug. 30 in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 103.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Katherine DeFevere.

Dr. Berci brought a precise eye and an inventor’s zeal to innovations that enabled doctors to better visualize the bladder, colon, esophagus, prostate, common bile duct and other body parts. Until earlier this summer, he was the senior director of minimally invasive surgery research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had worked since 1969.

His innovations were critical to the revolution in minimally invasive endoscopies and laparoscopies, which dramatically reduced the need for surgeons to make large incisions.

In endoscopies, doctors use a flexible tube with a light and a camera to examine the upper and lower digestive system. Dr. Berci focused mainly on the area around the throat and vocal cords.

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In laparoscopies, surgeons place a thin rod with a video camera attached at the end through a small abdominal incision. Carbon dioxide is then used to inflate the space to give doctors enough room to use small instruments to, among other things, remove gallbladders, cysts, tumors, appendixes and spleens; diagnose endometriosis; and repair hernias.

Working at a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Berci adapted an existing miniaturized television camera, which he attached to an endoscope. It allowed procedures to be shown on monitors so that the medical team could work from the screen. One early broadcast was the bronchoscopy of a dog.

“Surgeons didn’t have to look through the telescope anymore,” Dr. Berci told General Surgery News in 2019, referring to the monocular view through the eyepiece of the endoscope that was standard at the time. “The video allowed everyone to see.”

While still in Australia, Dr. Berci solved a vexing problem: Surgeons had to search blindly for gallstones lodged in the common bile duct, which carries bile from the liver and gallbladder to the small intestine.

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“Why don’t we use something to look into the tunnel to see what we’re doing?” Dr. Berci, recalling his thinking, said in “George Berci: Trials, Triumphs, Innovations,” a 2013 documentary written and directed by Dr. L. Michael Brunt for the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons.

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Dr. Berci brought in a fluoroscope to produce real-time X-ray images of the procedure. He also found a way, with an engineer, to reduce the fluoroscope’s high levels of radiation.

In addition, he became a vigorous advocate for the widespread use of the choledecoscope, a laparoscopic instrument that is used to illuminate the bile duct and remove gallstones. Working with Karl Storz, a German medical equipment manufacturer, he helped adapt it from a rigid instrument to a flexible one.

“He popularized it,” said Dr. Edward Phillips, a professor of surgery at Cedars-Sinai. “He would go into operating rooms, see urologists struggling to take stones out and show the choledecoscope to them.”

He collaborated with manufacturers like Storz and Boston Scientific, making sketches that led to new equipment, much of which sent more light into the biliary system.

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Dr. Berci won the Jacobson Innovation Award from the American College of Surgeons in 2011. His inventions, designed on his own and with others, included a video endoscopic microscope, video laryngoscopes for intubation, and scissors and graspers for endoscopies.

“It is unlikely that there will ever be another surgeon who so single-handedly impacts an entire field of surgery as Dr. Berci did,” said Dr. Brunt, the producer of the documentary, who is a professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “He understood the potential for laparoscopy and its applications long before most surgeons saw any value in it.”

Dr. Berci was born Gyorgy Bleier on March 14, 1921, in Szeged, Hungary. His father, Alex, was hired soon after as the assistant conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the family moved to Austria. His mother, Ella (Rosensohn) Bleier, was a piano teacher who divorced her husband when Gyorgy was young and eventually remarried.

Raised in a family that loved music, Gyorgy began taking violin lessons at age 3 and was playing concertos by the time he was 10. As antisemitic laws restricted Jewish lives and limited his educational opportunities, he and his family moved to Budapest.

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But the lives of Jews weren’t much better there. Gyorgy, who was not allowed to attend a public high school, entered a private Jewish school, washing cars to help pay the tuition. Prevented from attending medical school because he was Jewish, he got a job as an apprentice in an electrical shop and later worked in mechanical engineering, training that proved invaluable when he designed medical instruments.

He was forced into slave labor in 1942, at times digging defensive fortifications in the mountains in the winter; he was later sent to a railway center in Poland, where he unloaded ammunition and explosives from German trains onto trucks.

During an American air raid over Budapest in June 1944, Gyorgy and other prisoners escaped when their guards fled the bombing. Soon after, he joined the Hungarian underground, delivering false papers to Jews in hiding.

In early 1945, after Budapest was liberated by Russian forces, Gyorgy and his family returned to Szeged. Having been prevented from attending medical school, he still felt an emotional pull to study music and become an orchestral conductor. But as he recalled in the documentary, “I have a Jewish mother who made the decision.” She told him, “You will be a doctor.”

In 1950 — after he had changed his surname to Berci to avert antisemitism — he graduated from the University of Szeged Medical School and soon began working on methods to preserve arteries. But he left Hungary shortly after Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956; he and other surgeons operated on about 250 people injured in the attack.

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He returned to Vienna, where he applied for and received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in experimental surgery. Instead of going to the United States, he moved with his mother, stepfather, daughter and wife (from whom he was then separated) to Melbourne. But before he could resume his surgical career, he had to learn English — about 120 words a day over six months, he said. He got his medical license in 1959 and worked mainly at the Royal Melbourne Hospital until 1967.

He was recruited to Cedars-Sinai that year as a visiting scholar. Two years later, he joined the hospital full time as director of a new surgical endoscopy unit. Dr. Leon Morgenstern, then the hospital’s director of surgery, said that Dr. Berci quickly brought his expertise to nearly every surgical specialty — even when he wasn’t asked. And he was demanding.

“He made a lot of requests, and I wasn’t sure I could afford what he asked for,” Dr. Morgenstern said in the 2013 documentary. “But to my good fortune, and to his good fortune and to the good fortune of surgical endoscopy, I gave him what he wanted.”

Dr. Berci trained many surgeons and taught surgery at Cedars-Sinai and at the medical schools of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. He also wrote, or collaborated on, several books, including “Endoscopy” (1976), “Common Bile Duct Exploration” (1984, with Alfred Cuschieri) and “No Stones Left Unturned” (2021, with Frederick L. Greene).

And he continued playing the violin for fun, sometimes in duets with Ms. DeFevere, his daughter.

“Music was such a huge part of his life — listening and going to concerts,” she said. “But his work overtook that need. His work consumed him in a very good way.”

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In addition to Ms. DeFevere, his daughter from his marriage to Irene Celikovic, from whom he was divorced, Dr. Berci is survived by a son, Winton Berci, from his marriage to Suzie Diack, which also ended in divorce (as did an earlier marriage, to Suzanne Buckland); a stepdaughter, Liza Landsman Gold, and a stepson, Scott Landsman, from his marriage to Barbara Saltzman, which ended with her death in 2018; and seven grandchildren.

His daughter Nina Craig, whose mother was Ms. Diack, died in 2019.

The length of Dr. Berci’s tenure at Cedars-Sinai was noted by Bruce Gewertz, the hospital’s surgeon in chief, in an article in The Los Angeles Times two years ago.

“When I moved in,” Dr. Gewertz said, “there was this 85-year-old guy in the office next to mine and I thought, ‘Well, how long can that last?’”

He added: “Until Covidyabby, it was not uncommon for me to come into the office at 7 a.m. and find George already here working. And his achievements in the last 20 years of his life are probably as important as in the first 80.”

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