The European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) published an obituary on 15 July for physicist Stephen Bacharach, PhD.
"Steve Bacharach [was] one of the first physicists who worked in the nuclear medicine field on data processing and analysis techniques, in software development, in the improvement of mathematical models and quantitative methods, particularly in cardiology and oncology," wrote Luigi Mansi, of the Inter-University Research Center for Sustainability in Rome, in an article in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.
Bacharach’s work led to gated cardiac blood pool imaging, one of the pillars on which nuclear cardiology was built, and a scientific, clinical, and economic driving force of nuclear medicine for many years, Mansi noted.
Stephen Bacharach, PhD.
Bacharach received his PhD in applied physics from Cornell University and worked for nearly 40 years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He retired in 2005 as a senior tenured research scientist and head of the Imaging Science Group. He authored or co-authored over 200 scientific articles and many book chapters, as well as served for decades on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Journal of Nuclear Cardiology, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology - Cardiac imaging.
“I remember him as a brilliant man, very nice, generous, a lover of music, cinema, and everything that is culture,” Mansi wrote.
