Nearly nine years after the accident, the lawsuit was settled for $2.9 million, a settlement that was likely both diminished by, and made possible by, a pre-trial motion which excused GE Healthcare as a defendant to the suit.

The county-owned hospital, which almost immediately asserted its responsibility for the accident, ultimately settled the case on behalf of all of the remaining defendants, which included the head of radiology and the technologist who administered the boy’s scan.

Perhaps now, with the lawsuit resolved, we can actually learn something about the events that precipitated this tragedy, beyond the fragmentary slivers of information gleaned from court documents and news accounts.

That’s right, despite the fact that this one event has become the touchstone for MRI safety, there has not been a single root-cause analysis to inform MRI suite design, departmental operations, regulatory and accreditation frameworks… at least not one that has been shared with the public.

Hopefully, with the lawsuit resolved and jeopardy attached for all defendants, we can have an open conversation about what contributed to the accident and what can be done, at the thousands of MRI suites across the country, to help see that this sort of accident never recurs. Based on recent news accounts and last year’s shocking collection of ferromagnetic projectile accidents, the lessons from the Colombini tragedy are still profoundly needed.

If we are willing to explore this darkest chapter in the brief history of MRI, we may learn lessons that will help protect the 30 million Americans who will receive MRI’s this year, and next year, and the year after that.

If we fail, next year we’ll be able to look back at this moment, wistfully, and imagine young Michael getting his drivers’ license, or attending his junior prom, on the verge of adulthood. But he is forever trapped in 2001… a victim of circumstances he had no control over.

Let’s see what we can do, together, to help make sure that this never happens again.

My heartfelt thoughts and prayers are extended to the Colombini family.

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ThermaCare HeatWrap Products Contain Iron And May Be Drawn Into MRI Scanners

According to the report, this patient was not injured and the MR staff was able to successfully remove the wrap from the MRI magnet. But any time you have ferromagnetic materials flying through the air near patients and staff, there is the very real risk of injury. Not only to people, but also to a million-dollar MRI scanner!

And assuming that it didn’t go flying, if there’s enough iron in this product that there’s that possibility, there’s likely enough iron to create some significant spatial distortions in the general vicinity of the wrap. And if the little iron ‘nuggets’ were to escape the wrap material and get under the covers to the bore of the magnet, you could wind up with shim problems that require a service call to correct.

According to the ThermaCare website:

“Protected inside ThermaCare^® HeatWraps are air-activated heat discs made of heat-generating materials (iron, charcoal, table salt and water).”

We’re in the process of testing the capabilities of the SAFESCAN® ferromagnetic detectors to detect these materials and I hope to have an update for you on this very soon.

In the meantime, whether you have the SAFESCAN® ferromagnetic screening products or not, please add these types of wraps to your ‘watch list’ of potentially dangerous materials to be kept out of your MRI suites.

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Now, this time line actually fits nicely within the trial judge’s own disposition deadline of January 4th, 2010. At the moment, however, there still is one unresolved pre-trial motion, and there’s nothing to say that the parties to the trial won’t want to go and file more motions (which may wind up pushing the entire time line back, yet again).

Just over a month ago, I wrote about the resolution of three of the pre-trial motions in this case. I was startled by what appears to me to be a disconnect between the judge’s decisions on some of the questions put to the court in the pre-trial motions, and the real world practice of MRI.

It remains to be seen if, as has been done with an earlier pre-trial decision rendered by this same judge, the attorneys for the Colombini family seek to challenge the judge’s rulings on responsibility and authority of the defendants. If that happens, I imagine that it could easily result in another postponement of the actual start of the trial.

If you are interested in following developments on the trial (and other issues of MRI safety) more closely, you are invited to follow me on Twitter for periodic updates, as they become available.

This case (and the event that precipitated it) are likely to be the most important influences on MR safety (hopefully) for a long time. I invite and encourage you to follow these events as they unfold.

UPDATE: Details of the finalized lawsuit settlement are available here.

The first of the three motions decided was from GE Healthcare, seeking to be excused, altogether, as a defendant in the case. The trial judge granted GE’s motion, citing (primarily) Riegel v. Medtronic which gives manufacturers of medical devices very broad protections in state courts because the devices have been vetted for safety at the federal level.

The second outstanding motion, which was one filed by the Colombini family’s attorney, sought the ability to reinstate punative damages claims against GE Healthcare for their involvement in the accident. This motion was rendered moot when the judge granted GE’s motion to be excused from the case, entirely.

The last of the decided motions was a smorgasbord of requests of the remaining (non-GE) defendants to dismiss claims against assorted defendants, to disallow punitive damages against some defendants, and to disallow claims of ‘emotional distress’ by the father of the boy.

• The judge dismissed all causes of action against the senior MR technologist in the suite at the time of the accident because (1) it was not demonstrated that he bore any responsibility for a safe suite environment (in fact the judge’s decision defines the limits of his responsibility to the scanner room, itself), and (2) he was not the tech administering the scan for the boy and therefore had no direct responsibility for his care. The judge’s notes also diminish the technologists’ role in safety by stating that they are not MD’s and had minimal safety training.
• The judged refused to dismiss claims agains New York Medical College (affiliated with the hospital) based on the College’s contention that NYMC had no direct role in training of persons involved in the accident, allowing this issue to be tried in court.
• The judge dismissed claims associated with the father’s contention that he suffered emotional distress based on the legal definition which requires that the person filing the claim feel “unreasonbly threatened by bodily harm” directly to them. That the father felt that his son was unreasonably threatened falls outside the legal definition for the basis of a claim of emotional distress.
• The judge refused to dismiss claims for punitive damages against UIMA, the company that ran the MRI unit for the hospital, allowing that the failure to provide complete and effective safety training may ammount to “utter indifference or conscious disregard for the safety of others.”
• The judge stated that she thought that the technologist administering the scan exaggerated her job duties when she had previously stated that technologists were the MRI suite “gatekeepers” with responsibility to keep a “watchful eye” to prevent ferromagnetic material from being brought in. Since, per the judge, overall suite safety was NOT deemed a reasonable responsibility of a technologist, the judge disallowed the possibility of punitive damages against the tech that administered the scan.
• Finally, the judge dismissed any action for punitive damages against the radiologist who served both as the hospital’s Director of Radiology and president of UIMA, the contractor providing MRI services to the hospital, because he “had no experience supervising MRI facilities . . . and did not view himself as having taken on any supervisory responsibilities with respect to the MRI facility. . .”

If we accept that some level of MRI safety should be a basic right of everyone inside the MRI suite (including staff), then we need to identify who has a role in making sure that MRI safety is actually implemented.

My view is that all parties involved in providing and administering MRI exams have an obligation to the safety of the patient. This includes the organizations who own and operate the scanners for establishing standards and providing applicable training and verifying competencies, directors / administrators / safety officers who have broad duties on behalf of the organization for the protection of patient safety, any person — whether MD, RN or technologist — who works in the MR environment, sites where accidents occur to report incidents in which there was a reasonable potential for harm, and MR equipment manufacturers to actively collect, report, and distribute details of accidents that might help others to better protect against these risks. These responsibilities are both institutional and individual.

If the judge’s decisions on these motions are not challenged (as has happened previously in this case), we should be inching closer towards a real trial date. As of the date of this post, the case is still scheduled to be fully resolved by early January of 2010. It remains to be seen whether that deadline will hold, or be pushed back.

If you would like to read this most recent decision by the judge on the three pre-trial motions she decided, it is available for download. Just click here to download the judge’s decision in Word format (.doc) from the blog site New York Injury Cases. To see the blog site, just click here.

Of course, if you come back here to the ‘MRI Metal Detector’ blog, or subscribe to the RSS updates (click here for more information on the free RSS subscription), I’ll provide you with any and all updates as I get them.

UPDATE: Details of the finalized lawsuit settlement are available here.

Eight years ago this month (July 27th, 2001, to be exact), young Michael Colombini was fatally injured in an MRI accident involving a portable oxygen cylinder. The week surrounding the date of that accident is set aside each year as MRI Safety Week. This year, 2009, it falls July 27th through August 2nd.

During MRI Safety Week, MRI providers are encouraged to provide additional emphasis on safety provisions, training, inspection and equipment. This could serve as the anniversary date for annual inspections (cryogen safety systems, infection control, etc…). It is sometimes the additional motivator for special projects like labeling all portable equipment with the contemporary MR Safe, MR Conditional, MR Unsafe labels and designations. And sometimes it can be an opportunity to reinforce safety training for our MR staff and share a little bit of our daily safety mission with those outside MRI.

To make this easier, I’m posting two free Jeopardy-styled MRI safety quizzes (in Power Point format) for you to use for your staff, or for those who may not be quite so familiar with MRI safety. These resources are available at my new MRI Safety Week webpage.

But beyond sharing these resources with you, I am also offering for this to serve as a clearinghouse of MRI safety resources that you want to share with your colleagues. Drop me an email (my contact information is always at the foot of each post, or in the ‘about Tobias Gilk, editor’ in the box above and to the right) and we’ll see if we can share your posters, table-tents, questionnaires, articles, quizzes, or other downloadable resource with the broader MRI community.

This year, MRI Safety Week is more important than ever. The number of MRI exams continues to slowly climb, year-over-year, but rates of reported accidents are skyrocketing! We’ve seen nearly a 3-fold increase in the number of MRI accident reports to the FDA in just the last 4 years. Collectively, we have the opportunity to make a substantial impact in MRI safety.

Thanks to Mednovus for allowing me the time and resources to prepare these materials for you. But mostly, thank you for joining with me in again celebrating and promoting excellence in MRI safety through this special week.

Ferromagnetic detection doesn’t catch anything that existing screening protocols aren’t meant to catch.

That inflection makes a world of difference, as you’ll see in just a moment…

We’ve been screening for ferromagnetic materials as long as MRI has existed, but our historic technique of simply asking if someone has magnetic materials has not proven very effective. There are many accounts of magnet damage, injuries, and fatalities resulting from a failure to identify ferromagnetic materials before they were brought into the MRI room. And despite a universal familiarity with the risks of ferromagnetic materials, we as an industry seem unable to prevent them from recurring by using only these ‘old school’ screening protocols.

There was a policy in place to screen for ferromagnetic materials at this New York hospital in 2001:

And they had a policy to screen for ferromagnetic materials at this Seattle hospital in 2005:

They had a policy to screen for ferromagnetic materials at this hospital:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And here:

And lots, and lots of places that you can see here:

Honestly, I could drown you in pictures and accounts of ferromagnetic materials in the MRI suite. Suffice it to say that the accounts above are only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the most ironic (in light of what you’ve seen above) arguments against the need for ferromagnetic detection is that it isn’t foolproof.

Foolproof!?!? If that’s the standard, how can we reconcile the results of our conventional screening practices against this expectation of perfection? Clearly, we’re a very, very long way from that goal.

Instead of willfully disbelieving everything shown above… Instead of insisting on the infallibility of patient and visitor compliance with screening instructions, or the unblinking door-watching vigilance of the Technologists, or the guaranteed long-term effectiveness of MRI safety training for housekeeping, transport, engineering, security, anesthesia, ICU and respiratory staff, why can’t we accept that each of these protections, as valuable as they are, are imperfect, and that if maximum safety is our goal, we need to augment these long-standing – and incomplete – strategies with something new.

I freely state that ferromagnetic detection is not perfect. Under certain circumstances, it can miss things that we may want to find. It does, however, provide us with an entirely new feedback mechanism that helps us to more effectively monitor, train, screen, and protect people in the MRI environment. Imperfect though it is, it is remarkably effective at helping to improve the safety of everyone inside the MRI suite.

PS: I would like to thank the following people who have helped me by providing some of the images you’ve seen above, Moriel Ness Aiver, Raj Sangoi, and Keith Del Guercio.

Would using ferromagnetic detection (FMD), to add a new and effective layer of pre-MRI screening, be reimbursed? What I mean is, is there a CPT code to get paid back for providing this additional service?

No, but the lack of a CPT code has little to do with the fact that using FMD can contribute, directly, to an MRI provider’s bottom-line. In fact, there are two concrete ways, off of the top of my head, that I know have provided financial ‘payback’ to users of ferromagnetic detection systems.

First, the indirect. If you owned a million-dollar house on the Florida coast, don’t you think you’d spring for hurricane insurance? What if there was an insurance policy that didn’t pay you back a proportion of your loss, leaving you to start all over, but instead offered the promise of making it less likely that the hurricane would even hit you in the first place?

This is what ferromagnetic detection does… when used correctly it reduces the risks of unplanned maintenance for shim disturbances, interrupted throughput for incomplete patient screenings, downtime associated with extracting cell phones, jewelry, furniture, etc… from the bore, or worse, damage to your MRI system.

What is this preventative effect worth? Well, the Veterans Administration published their average cost for an MRI projectile accident at $43,172 per incident. This average included a number of lesser projectile accidents, such as cell phones, indicating that some of these accidents are likely into the 6-figure range. Plus, because the VA doesn’t operate on a per-procedure reimbursement rate, the $43,172 cost does not include lost patient revenue.

The published VA data does not give frequency information, so if we turn to the only peer reviewed publication that does (Chaljub, Cramer, et. al.), and extrapolate the frequency they give for only medical gas cylinder accidents and assume that the same frequency of once every 6 years applies to all projectile events, even the smaller projectiles (it would, in reality, be far more frequent), the annualized cost of projectile accidents is roughly $7,200 (this is the VA’s $43,172 cost per projectile accident, divided by the Chaljub frequency determination of 1 medical gas cylinder accident every 6 years of MRI operation).

This is a hyper-conservative number, given that it doesn’t include lost scan-time reimbursement from projectile accidents, is based on data that is approaching 10 years old (indications are that accident rates have been on a steady increase year-over-year), and doesn’t include smaller projectiles in the frequency determination. The above figure also doesn’t take into account unplanned shim-correction or lost throughput from patient re-screening. Based on expert information from a former co-director of the VA’s National Center for Patient Safety, the annualized cost of projectile accidents exceeds $20,000 per year per MRI.

Anybody who claims to be able to drive that cost to $0 is selling snake oil. Accidents will continue to happen because MRI is just too dynamic and complicated an environment to assure 100% effectiveness in managing all the variables, all the time. But what if ferromagnetic detection could help cut that cost in half? What if we could help slash that annualized cost to just 10% of what it was, would that be worthwhile?

The second way that I know of that FMD has paid for itself is through a reduction in linen costs. One of Mednovus’ clients went from requiring all outpatients to gown (at a laundry cost of about $3 per patient) to only having about 1/4 of their patients gown (who was gowned was a function of the type of exam and the degree to which the staff felt comfortable with the patient’s ability to comply with screening instructions). All patients were screened with a hand-held ferromagnetic detector. This client reduced ongoing laundry costs, reduced average patient prep time, and improved screening effectiveness.

In a way, this provider found a way to get automatic reimbursement for using ferromagnetic detection pre-screening. It isn’t a CPT code, but the savings for linen service drops to the bottom line, just as a per-procedure reimbursement would.

So if we set aside the entire question of safety for patients and staff in the MRI environment and look at ferromagnetic detection solely though a lens of cost effectiveness, smartly deployed FMD systems can have very rapid return on investment (ROI) periods, in some cases only a matter of months!

Whether you look at ferromagnetic detection systems as something of a risk-management ‘insurance policy’, or a throughput management tool, or cost-containment for laundry services, or any of the other creative and constructive ‘revenue-positive’ solutions, a serious look comes away with the assessment that, “Yes, ferromagnetic detection is cost effective.”

And this is just the financial aspect, we haven’t even touched on the safety, best practice and accreditation parts of the equation…

1. Resistance, or “What the [bleep] is this thing and who’s making me use it?”

One of the first steps in the path to embracing ferromagnetic detection is often resistance. Some MR staffers assume that the presence of a ferromagnetic screener demonstrates an implicit lack of faith in their ability to screen patients. This couldn’t be further from the truth!

The problem with effective patient screening has always been with the patient. At UPMC, where the Technologists work with the MR-safety-minded Dr. Emanuel Kanal, they found that 44% of all patients that had professed to be free of ferromagnetic material were, in fact, just about to walk into the MRI scanner room with some type of ferromagnetic material on them! That’s almost half the patients at one of the most MRI safety conscious sites in the whole world!

Ferromagnetic screening tools aren’t an indication that administration doesn’t have faith in the Techs, they’re protection for the Techs because it’s patient compliance that we don’t have faith in.

In fact, even with ferromagnetic detection we depend on the conscientious screening and observation of patients by skilled MR Technologists. No technology, not even ferromagnetic detection, is 100% foolproof, but this additional layer of protection has helped Techs to find threats that would have otherwise slipped past.

2 Annoyance, or “Why the [bleep] is this thing alarming on these subjects?”

One of the first thing that sites that ‘plug in’ ferromagnetic detection into their existing protocols find is just how poor patient compliance really is! We thought we did a great job of getting patients to follow our instructions… that is until there was a tool that could actually help measure patient compliance. Without that alarm, the person would more than likely have sauntered into the MR scanner room with whatever we didn’t know about in their pocket. Often, the bits of ferromagnetic-contraband that patients sneak in with wouldn’t cause any harm and can be rationalized-away, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes what get’s missed in conventional screening and access protocols is big, ugly, and scary…

3. Utter surprise, or “How the [bleep] did that get past screening!?”

This might not happen for the first hundred or more patients, but sooner or later you’re likely to be stunned by something identified by the detector that would have been very dangerous if it made it into the scanner room.

What sorts of things? Toolboxes, conventional wheelchairs, steel IV poles, medication pumps, knives, weights, gas cylinders, and the list goes on, and on… These are precisely the sorts of things that ferromagnetic detectors find at facilities across the country. They’re the things that aren’t supposed to be there in the first place, or, if they are there, are supposed to be immediately ID’d by the staff and kept way-far away from the magnet room. But all procedures break down at some point, and the maintenance contractor, or the new person in transport, may not know about your policies.

4. Gratitude, or “Thank goodness this got found!”

It only takes one or two rude awakenings to things that were about to enter the magnet room to change one’s entire outlook on ferromagnetic detection. Imagine the potential damage from that found oxygen cylinder, or the injury that might have resulted from the non-MR infusion pump that nearly made it into the room, and all of the sudden any alerts from the detector become music to Technologists’ ears because they’re the warning for the accident that hasn’t yet happened (and may now, for the first time, be caught before it does).

5. Reliance, or “I couldn’t imagine not doing this for a patient now.”

Some people are unduly concerned about MR staffers jumping right to this final stage and that the Techs will think that ferromagnetic detection technology is going to absolve them of of patient screening responsibility. Personally, I’ve seen many ferromagnetic detection installations and have yet to witness anything like this. The greater concern is that sites give-up trying before step 3 and fail to realize the tremendous benefits to patient safety that ferromagnetic detection provides.

We have clients who tell us about what their SAFESCAN® detector has found on ‘cleared’ patients, or on doctors or nurses who have come down from the floors with a patient. If you found the objects that many of our clients have found (and they generally tend to run top-notch MRI centers, so it’s not as if they need ferromagnetic detection more than anyone else), you’d be instantly convinced of the value, too.

It is worth noting that no technology is 100% foolproof, not even ferromagnetic detection. It’s a tool, and a tremendously helpful one at that, but it has limitations. But just because it can’t do everything isn’t a reason to not use it.

If you’re blindfolded at the edge of a cliff, you don’t know how much that first wrong-step is going to hurt, and hurt badly. And if you don’t know what patients and staff have been carrying into the MRI suite, risking their lives (and perhaps yours), you have no reason to be concerned. But as soon as you begin quantifying how much dangerous material is trying to get into your MRI room, you, like our clients, will never again want to go without the protection of a ferromagnetic screening!

First, let’s get the issue of non-ferromagnetic metals taken care of.

Metals that aren’t attracted to magnets are non-ferromagnetic. However, even if they aren’t attracted to the magnet, non-ferromagnetic metals do still interact with the magnetic field. They can cause local distortions which can mess up MRI scans (making it very difficult to image anatomy close to any metallic implant or object). Orthodontic braces may make certain facial / brain scans difficult. Orthopedic implants may disrupt the MR imaging of areas right around the pin / plate / screw / rod. Different materials will have different disruptive properties, so never assume that you can’t be imaged simply because you have an orthopedic implant. Check with a radiologist.

Also, MR imaging makes use of radio frequency (RF) energy. Like magnetism, RF is non-ionizing (doesn’t break down DNA and give rise to cancers as X-ray energies have been shown capable of), and like magnetism RF interacts with electrically conductive materials. If an electrically conductive element is the right shape and/or size, the material may inadvertently serve as an antenna for the RF signal and the energy may disproportionately collect in the conductor. As you may remember from high school physics, energy doesn’t just ‘go away,’ it converts. in the case of RF energy, it converts to heat. If you have the ‘ideal’ antenna length and/or configuration for a particular radio frequency, it can cause remarkable heating and that heat can cause damage.

But just as with the issue of image disruption, don’t assume that the presence of an electrical conductor inside your body is an automatic contraindication for an MRI exam. Consult your radiologist.

For these reasons, it is important to identify all electrically conductive materials on or in the patient. But even with these real risks associated with non-ferromagnetic materials, the greatest threat, both in terms of numbers of incidents and fatalities, is ferromagnetic materials.

Now, let’s move on to ferromagnetic materials. Some of this may seem familiar to you if you’ve read my prior post on MRI and Metal, but work with me here and you’ll find that we delve a little deeper into what happens that makes ferromagnetic materials such a concern.

When a ferromagnetic material enters a magnetic field, it becomes a magnet itself. A ferromagnetic material accepts an induced magnetic field. Many ferromagnetic materials give up the field almost as easily as they accept it, so they aren’t significantly magnetized. Think of them in the same way as I’m a baseball fan… when surrounded by baseball fans, I can pretend to be interested. Away from other baseball fans, I have almost zero interest in the game.

So, if a ferromagnetic material becomes a magnet when exposed to another magnet, we now have two magnets, and we all know what happens when we bring two magnets together… [SNAP]

Actually, when we bring two magnets together, two distinct things happen. The first is that the two magnets work to align themselves to one another. We know that two like magnetic fields (positive-to-positive) will repel each other, but opposite polarity fields will attract. The natural action is that the magnets will work to rotate themselves in order to align their fields positive-to-negative. Compass needles are the living illustration of this as we count on them to rotate to align with the North Pole.

In the case of a ferromagnetic object brought near an MRI, let’s compare our two magnets. One weighs perhaps 12 tons and is bolted to the floor, the other is a pair of scissors that weigh a few ounces. Which of these two things is going to rotate to align itself? Right, the scissors.

So the smaller ferromagnetic objects that we wear, carry, or have placed within our bodies, are going to be subject to intense forces that will be working to align the magnetic polarity of the object to the massive (in weight and strength) magnetic polarity of the MRI magnet. This results in torque forces that can twist, turn and even tear whatever may be trying to hold them in place.

The other mechanical force that develops between two magnets is the one we’re all very familiar with… attractive force. As we bring two magnets that have aligned themselves to one another (or, as it the case of sticking a magnet to your fridge door, the non-magnetized large ferromagnetic material develops a localized magnetic domain in order to receive the fridge-door magnet you’re sticking to it), they snap together, often with startling speed and strength.

We describe this phenomenon in MRI as the ‘missile effect’ because ferromagnetic objects, propelled by enormous amounts of magnetic energy, can launch across the room with tremendous force towards an MRI. While magnetic projectiles may look as though they’ve been launched from a cannon, unlike ‘launched’ projectiles, these magnetic missiles don’t lose their inertia just because they hit something. Their singular mission in life is to reach the strongest part of that magnetic field and, if interrupted in their flight, they will incessantly continue applying pressure to try and push their way towards the peak of the magnetic field (typically the center of the MRI).

The torque from rotating ferromagnetic materials and the force of flying ferromagnetic materials have each killed people in the MRI, and caused many injuries, and done horrific damage to MRI machines and their components. This presents two major problems…

First, metal is everywhere. It’s in our shoes. It’s in the shiny filaments in our clothes. Our belt-buckles. It’s in the stuff in our pockets. It’s often in thing that are labeled ‘sand bags’. It’s in stuffed animals and even often in hospital pillows. Metal is an unavoidable part of modern life.

Second, as I described in my prior post on metal and MRI, it’s impossible to visually distinguish between magnetic and non-magnetic metals. Even if we know something is made out of wood, for example, doesn’t mean that we can be confident that it isn’t held together with steel screws or reinforced with a steel rod. So, not only is metal ubiquitous, but ferromagnetic metals are perhaps the most widespread types of metal used in contemporary life.

Because of the torque and attraction risks of ferromagnetic materials, many tools and devices made for use in the MRI environment that require the strength and durability of metal use of aluminum, titanium, brass and other non-magnetic materials.

It is the intersection of these concerns – that all types of metal are everywhere and that we usually want to admit non-ferromagnetic metals into the MRI room – that generates the need for a detection system that distinguishes only ferromagnetic material.

The name of this blog is the MRI Metal Detector for precisely this reason… while I frequently digress and discuss many things relevant to MRI safety, at the heart this forum is about the specific risks associated with ferromagnetic metals and, equally importantly, the contemporary tools that can be effectively deployed to help reduce those risks.

To help protect patients, staff, and millions of dollars of MRI equipment, I recommend (as do the VA, the ACR and others) that every MRI provider avail themselves of ferromagnetic detection to help more effectively screen people and equipment intended to enter the MRI suite.

That’s right, a guy getting an MRI in Colorado had a nail, purportedly stuck in his nasal cavity for approximately 30 years, wriggled loose and he coughed it up shortly after the exam! Follow the link below to view the video (after a short, but annoying commercial):

News video on MRI’s and nails in noses!

Ferromagnetic detection systems have caught a variety of unusual and unsuspected magnetic objects before they entered the room with the giant MRI magnet, but at the time I write this, no ferromagnetic detection system has been approved for finding things internal to the body of a person… even nails.

Would it have been possible for a ferromagnetic detection instrument to find an inch-long nail at a distance of an inch or two, say buried inside a beef roast? Yes, but it would depend greatly on the instrument and the conditions in which it was operated.

I don’t recommend sticking ferromagnetic materials in orifices just to test the sensitivity of your detector (a friend of mine did this with a BB in his ear… took several days to get it out). If you have questions about your instrument, ask the manufacturer.

And whatever you do, don’t go putting nails (or anything else, for that matter) up your nose!