My father Roy Bentley, who has died aged 87, was a medical physicist whose career spanned almost the entire history of the speciality.
The son of Frank, a chartered accountant, and his wife, Stella (nee Barker), who helped out in the family hosiery and glove business, Roy was educated at West Bridgford grammar school, Nottingham, and Birmingham University. His PhD, awarded in 1955, focused on the uptake of radioisotopes in fats and laid significant ground for the use of markers in medical imaging.
In May 1957, days after completing his national service as an RAF radio instructor, Roy married Kathleen Kelly, a musician whom he met at university, and at the end of the month joined the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) at the Royal Marsden hospital, Surrey.
After a fire at the Windscale nuclear plant, in Cumbria, that year, radioactive contamination spread across the UK; this was also at the time of intensive airborne testing of hydrogen bombs. It was therefore important to assess how much contamination could enter the human body. Roy developed and operated radiation detectors to measure small amounts of beta radioactivity: beta particles are able to penetrate and change the molecular structure of living matter. This can cause cancer or death. He published several papers on the subject in Nature.
Roy then turned his attention to the application of computers in medicine, working on radiotherapy treatment planning and, with the physicist Jo Milan, developed the first computerised system for radiotherapy treatment in the UK. It shortened the time taken to calculate the correction dose of radiation and made its application more accurate. This work underpins the image-based systems that are now an integral part of radiotherapy treatment.
Roy was also instrumental in the introduction of a computerised hospital information system, and in 1983 brought the first departmental computer to the Royal Marsden physics department. He commented at the time: “The VAX computer has something called email. I doubt this will ever catch on but I’ll enable it anyway.”
A founder member of the International Conference on the Use of Computers in Radiotherapy, Roy travelled extensively, making significant contacts in eastern Europe and learning German to further communications at a time when English was not so widely spoken.
While taking a year’s sabbatical in the biomedical computer department at Washington University, St Louis, in 1967-68, he was in the first team to link a computer online to a gamma camera. In this way he succeeded in digitally imaging medical radioisotopes, which reveal abnormalities in organs of the body. In this and many other areas, Roy played key roles in providing the expertise and infrastructure that are at the core of many cancer treatments to this day.
He retired in 1995 and served for several years as a Liberal Democrat councillor in the London borough of Sutton. He supported the work of Amnesty International and continued volunteering for Age Concern into his 80th year.
Roy is survived by Kathleen and their sons, Paul and me.
