About MRI Safety
MRI is one of the safest medical imaging procedures available.
Unlike X-ray imaging or CT-scanners (which use X-rays), MRI’s do not use ionizing radiation, a type of radiation which causes genetic damage and leads to increased risks of cancer.
MRI imaging, by contrast, uses magnetism and radio frequency (RF) energy, plus some very clever advanced physics, to generate images. To date there have been no quality studies that demonstrate that either magnetic fields or properly administered RF energy have any dangerous long term effects on our biological bodies. This is not to say that MRI imaging is perfectly safe and ‘foolproof.’
The magnets needed for MRI imaging are typically tens of thousands of times more powerful than the Earth’s own magnetic field. These uber-powerful magnetic fields can act on magnetic materials nearby (as in things you carry with you, like a nail clipper or tool) and turn those objects into magnet-homing missiles. The same magnetic forces also penetrate your body and can act equally powerfully on magnetic objects within you (such as aneurysm clips, or pacemakers, or orthopedic implants).
For these reasons it is critically important that every person and object entering the MRI area be comprehensively screened for magnetic / metal materials before they’re allowed to approach the MRI’s giant magnet.
There are other safety concerns attributable to the administration of the MRI exam, itself… things such as the proper settings for the scan, positioning the patient correctly so that they don’t rub up against the scanner, and making sure that the patient has appropriate hearing protection (these scans can be extraordinarily loud).
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What are the safety laws, for being called out for an emergancy in- patient at an off site facility for MRI? You are the only employee with an emt, that has no training in MRI. In West Virginia.
If the patient is currently admitted (sometimes they discharge to send off-site, then re-admit to work around this), then the facility must conform to hospital regulations. If it is JCAHO accredited, then it must conform to those accreditation standards. If the patient is a Medicare / Medicaid patient, then the site must also conform to CMS’s ‘conditions of participation’ requirements, including a requirement to have a licensed physician on site if contrast is being administered. I can’t quote you from these different standards. Generally, they’re all quite weak on MRI safety specifics, but they might have something on emergency preparedness for code situations. Hope that’s at least something…
planning to put an MRI in medical office and need to know the minimal space requirements. We have designated about 600sq feet of space for control room and MRI machine. Is this enough space?
Good question! The answer, however, depends on a few factors…
What kind of MRI is it? How big is the machine itself? How far does the fringing field reach? What are the adjacent functions and equipment (including above and below)? Will you support any special clinical functions (e.g. sedation / G.A., image-guided biopsy…)? Will you support any special patient populations (e.g. bariatric, geriatric, pediatric, prisoners…)?
All of these elements have direct bearing on the size of the room you need.
Generally speaking, for contemporary, actively-shielded bore-format MR systems, we design the magnet room 18 to 20 feet wide (wider if the room is to support G.A. cases or biopsy), and 25 to 30 feet long (depending on how much of the fringe field we want to capture). This means that the magnet room, alone, will be a minimum of 500 square feet. Computer equipment rooms usually need to be somewhere between 150 and 200 square feet. Control rooms generally get very cramped if they’re less than 150 square feet. That gives you a minimum of 800 square feet, and that is only the interior area of the rooms (add area for wall thicknesses, as well as circulation among the functional areas).
I hope this helps.
Tobias