Guess what? Today is one of my somedays! Or, I should say, today promises to be one of my somedays (there’s the cautious vein running through my optimism).

Today the FDA announced that they are hosting a public workshop on MRI Safety! Faced with staggering growth in MRI accidents and a diaspora of state, accreditation, professional and regulation organizations (who either can’t or won’t acknowledge the role that they each could have played in preventing the dramatic increase in accidents), the FDA is assembling a public workshop not unlike the one that fostered unprecedented cooperation among industry, providers and regulatory bodies to address ionizing radiation exposure concerns in ionizing medical imaging.

Like the ionizing predecessor, the challenge for the MRI safety workshop will be twofold… first, getting stakeholders (who disavow being stakeholders with a responsibility) to work together will be like herding cats. Fortunately, there are a few of us crazies [ahem] zealots, er enthusiasts who won’t forsake this opportunity and will help marshal the kitten rodeo. Second, and more critical, will be the commitment to actually doing something!

“Try harder” or “Improve tech education” or “Develop a policy” have all been tried to death! The ‘we promise we’ll do better in the future’ line, without specific, measurable criteria, has been the staple of MRI safety improvement efforts over the course of time in which we’ve seen the rates of MRI accidents grow to five times what they were just a few years ago. The promise to ‘do better’ is wholly inadequate. The promise to ‘measure up’ to an explicit standard is what we need.

Alarming Growth In MRI Accidents

This planned meeting – or more specifically, the progress that it represents – is long overdue, as is this contribution to this forum.

If you would like to participate in this upcoming FDA meeting, scheduled for October 25th – 26th, 2011, please sign up soon on the FDA’s registration website, here.

I hope to see you in DC, herding cats and agitating for standards for the safety of MRI patients and staff!

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First, I was asked to give a presentation on MR safety and legal responsibility two separate times during the conference. Both sessions were very well attended… the first one was standing room only! Lots of attendee feedback was along the lines of

‘I wish I could have bottled this message to take it back to my CEO,’ or

‘my lead MR tech was so jealous that I got to see this,’ or

‘this was the most important session of the whole conference.’

I am flattered and humbled by the responses to the presentation and excited about the growing interest in MR safety.

Second, though I didn’t get to sit-in on nearly as many of the other sessions as I would have liked, I was thrilled that conference participants were asking MR safety questions in other break-out groups. There were questions about MR safety in facility design, questions to the ACR representatives about accreditation standards, and others.

Third, the interest and responses from people I talked with, and others that our Mednovus team had conversations with, ferromagnetic detection has shifted from the popular sentiment of ‘why would I ever do that’ to ‘I know I need to do that… now it’s just making it a budgetary priority.’ For the first time, ever, this was a trade show where not one manager of an MR facility said, ‘oh, I know what that is but we don’t need it.’

As always, the AHRA annual meeting was exceptionally well planned and executed. And, also as always, it is a tremendous forum for getting a sense of the state of the industry with regards to attention to MRI safety. The results of that are crystal clear… there is a greater awareness of – and concern about – MR safety and, in particular, ferromagnetic detection.

That’s precisely what about 100 – 200 Radiology Administrators at the AHRA Annual Meeting, held just a couple weeks ago in Denver, found out in Dr. Kanal’s MRI Safety Update presentation.

His talk whisked through a number of topics in the brief hour that he had, but one of the chief subjects of his presentation was his enthusiastic support for the use of ferromagnetic detection (FMD) systems as a quality assurance step to assure patient compliance.

At his direction, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has purchased 20 Mednovus SAFESCAN® hand-held Target Scanners™, which are in use throughout the UPMC system. Dr. Kanal’s MRI suite is also the ‘proving grounds’ for ferromagnetic detectors from different vendors and he highlighted the use of the Mednovus Entry Sentinel® GS walk-through portal, which is currently being used in a trial to verify screening compliance.

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to share with you specific excerpts from Dr. Kanal’s presentation to the AHRA annual meeting. Suffice it to say that the world’s foremost authority on the breadth of MRI safety issues is a firm believer that MRI-projectile accidents are among the most common source of MRI-related injury – and that ferromagnetic detection can be a remarkably effective tool to help minimize these most frequent safety lapses.

Stay tuned for more information from Dr. Kanal’s presentation, coming soon.