Posts Tagged ‘accident’
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Here we sit, on the cusp of mandatory accreditation for ‘Advanced Imaging’ modalities at outpatient providers (these are CT, MRI and PET), and a series of articles on medical radiation exposure splashes across the New York Times.
In nearly concurrent moves, the Joint Commission (JC) unveils their just-developed Advanced Imaging (AI) accreditation program, the FDA is clamoring for new authority to regulate medical device safety (or gearing-up to use authority that it’s been hiding for safe-keeping, that isn’t exactly clear to me), the US Congress whips together a set of hearings on the issue, and, at those hearings, the American College of Radiology (ACR) recommends that the Feds expand the scope of the AI accreditation requirement to include radiation therapy and to apply the expanded accreditation requirements to hospitals, too.
Whew, that’s a lot of ground covered for radiology in just the last few weeks! Wait a minute… who is that sitting in the backseat? Who has been drug through all of the hullabaloo about radiation exposure and patient safety without once having been considered, individually? MRI, that’s who.
Click To Read About How MRI Should Be Considered…
Tags: accident, accreditation, ACR, advanced imaging, American College of Radiology, CMS, congress, CT, diagnostic, exposure, FDA, hearing, IAC, ICAMRL, imaging, injury, Intersocietal Commission, ioinizing, JC, Joint Commission, magnetic resonance, MRI, PET, radiation, radiology, regulation, reimbursement, requirement, safety, standard, state
Posted in Other MRI Safety | No Comments »
Friday, February 19th, 2010
How to pick just one when there are a number of alarming, tragic, and needless MRI accidents to choose from? Let’s look at one that we can help the reader better imagine, the case of a pair of flying scissors that had to be surgically removed from a technologist’s forehead…

Click For The Rest Of This Story…
Tags: accident, burn, death, detector, FDA, ferromagnetic, head, imaging, injury, magnetic, MAUDE, MRI, patient, pre-screen, radiology, resonance, safety, scissors, screen, skull, Technologist
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 2 Comments »
Friday, February 12th, 2010
News broke the other day of a nurse in England who was in agony for three months following a routine surgery during which her gall-bladder was removed. Fearing an infection, she was sent for an MRI. Unfortunately, the MRI could not be completed as the magnetic field began torquing the 7-inch pair of forceps that had been left inside her abdomen during the surgery, causing excruciating pain! Click Here For The Follow-Up X-ray And The Rest Of The Story…
Tags: accident, detection, England, ferromagnetic, forceps, gall bladder, injury, instrument, magnetic resonance, MRI, never event, retained, surgery, surgical, UK, x-ray
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Go grab yourself a cup of coffee before you continue… this is going to be a long (for me, anyway) rant.
Ready? OK…
Let’s start at the very beginning (“what a very good place to start”). Click To Read The Whole Story…
Tags: accident, accreditation, ACR, American College of Radiology, ASHE, best practice, colombini, death, detector, ECRI, FDA, ferromagnetic, GE, guidelines, Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities, healthcare, imaging, injury, JCAHO, Joint Commission, law, lawsuit, legal, license, magnetic, magnetic resonance, Marzendorfer, Mednovus, metal, Michael, MRI, MRI Design Guide, radiology, regulation, require, safety, Siemens, standard, TJC, VA
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
This week the settlement documents were released — closing the chapter on the lawsuit that arose from the seminal event in MRI safety, the 2001 oxygen tank fatality of then-six-year-old Michael Colombini.
Click To Learn More About The Accident And Settlement…
Tags: accident, civil, colombini, death, fatality, ferromagnetic, hazard, imaging, injury, lawsuit, liability, magnet, magnetic, magnetic resonance, medical, metal, missile, MR, MRI, patient, projectile, radiology, regulation, resonance, safety, screening, suit, trial
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 2 Comments »
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
It is the stuff of fabled oral-histories, often dismissed as MRI urban-legend. The patient is wheeled into the MRI room on a gurney that goes flying toward the scanner. “How on Earth could these accidents happen when we know about these risks,” the skeptics question? Almost never does more than a single fragment of information surface about these sorts of accidents and, without verification, nearly all accounts can be erroneously written-off as fiction. Or, that was until enough pieces fell into place to conclusively document a recent episode… Click Here To Read More About MRI Gurney Accidents…

Woman On Hospital Gurney 'Sandwiched' Against MRI :
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Tags: accident, accreditation, death, detection, detector, FDA, ferromagnetic, hazard, imaging, injury, magnetic, magnetic resonance, MAUDE, medical, metal, missile, MR, MRI, patient, projectile, radiology, regulation, resonance, risk, safety, screening, suit
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 3 Comments »
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Yesterday I was provided a copy of an anonymized MRI accident / incident report which described how an MRI patient wearing a ThermaCare HeatWrap (something of a self-warming patch for muscle aches) had the wrap pulled off of them by the magnetic attraction of the MRI.

ThermaCare HeatWrap Products Contain Iron And May Be Drawn Into MRI Scanners
Click To Read More About This Incident And How To Prevent Similar Accidents From Occurring…
Tags: accident, detector, ferromagnetic, ferrous, hazard, heat, imaging, injury, iron, magnet, metal, missile, MRI, near-miss, projectile, resonance, risk, SAFESCAN, safety, screening, ThermaCare, wrap
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
But 2010 holds the promise of reversing course.
Throughout 2009, we saw tantalizing glimpses of potential MRI safety improvements, which repeatedly escaped becoming real. Here are my ‘Top 3′ near-miss opportunities of 2009 to substantially reshape MR safety…
Tags: accident, accreditation, ACR, American College of Radiology, best practice, FDA, imaging, JCAHO, Joint Commission, magnetic resonance, MRI, radiology, regulation, safety, TJC
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 7th, 2009
This post attempts to draw-together two recent threads from here on the MRI Metal Detector blog. First, there was a long-running question about the FDA and their online-accessible database of medical device accidents which, for months, appeared to be malfunctioning, and recently was repaired. Second, there was my post in which I identified 5 MRI ‘Never Events’ which, if industry standard procedures are followed, should never occur.
Click For Several Recent Examples Of MRI Never Events…
Tags: accident, accreditation, FDA, imaging, injury, magnetic, MAUDE, MRI, never event, patient, radiology, regulation, resonance, risk, safety
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
For a couple of months, at least, the FDA’s MAUDE database wasn’t displaying all of the accident narratives online… This appears to have been fixed!
A number of the MRI accident reports, when the narratives weren’t appearing, were little more than the name and mailing address of the MRI manufacturer. Today, if you want to read about the MR Technologist who had a pair of scissors magnetically-impelled into his forehead, you can do so. So Click Here If You’re Curious…
Tags: accident, database, device, FDA, hazard, imaging, injury, magnetic, MAUDE, MDR, medical, missile, MRI, projectile, resonance, risk, safety, scissors
Posted in Ferromagnetic Detection for MRI Safety, Other MRI Safety | 3 Comments »