Benedict Cassen
Benedict Cassen (* 1902 in New York City , † 1972 in Santa Monica ) was an American medical physicist. He is known for pioneering body scanning methods in medical imaging.
life and work
Raised in the Connecticut countryside, Cassen graduated from the Royal College of Science in London with a degree in mathematics and physics in 1927. In 1930 he received his PhD magna cum laude from Caltech on high-performance x-ray tubes. He went into medicine as a physicist and worked for Westinghouse Research Laboratories and Harper Hospital in Detroit . He then went to the US Naval Ordinance Station in Pasadena and from 1947 worked as a research physicist in the nuclear medicine project of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (later the Laboratory for Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology). He was Professor of Biophysics at UCLA, where he played a leading role in building a cyclotron facility that opened in 1971. He also advised the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies and the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital.
He is best known for developing a scintillation counter with an automatic scanning function, which revolutionized the development of nuclear medicine in 1951. The scintillation counter was moved in a straight line with an electric motor drive. At that time, the scanner was used to determine the radiation of the thyroid gland after treatment with radioactive iodine and soon found wide use in other body organs after the development of organ-specific radiopharmaceuticals. Later he developed automatic analysis methods for blood cell populations with students, for example, and investigated the effect of pressure waves, for example from explosions, on the human body.
Honors
In 1970 he received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine. An award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine is named after him.
literature
- William H. Blahd: Benedict Cassen. The Father of Body Organ Imaging . In: Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals , Vol. 15 (2000), pp. 423-429, ISSN 1084-9785 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cassen, Benedict |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American medical physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1972 |
| Place of death | Santa Monica |