MRI Metal Detector Blog

If you ever get a chance to hear Dr. Kanal speak, GO! Apart from being Director of MR Services for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a Fellow of both the ISMRM and the ACR, Chair of the ACR’s MR Safety Committee and one of the world’s experts in instruction for the mind-boggling complexity of MR physics, you’ll also find him to be one of the most animated, enthusiastic and downright approachable speakers, ever.

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.