Cube: MRI
True winner of a Darwin award
Carrying a 9kg necklace seems a bit silly. Though I suppose “for weight training” could just as well mean something medical, like needing to build up muscle mass after an operation.
What I need to know is: how is a man that was “not supposed to be in the room” specifically getting fetched by a technician to go into the room? I would have said “do not go past the antechamber” a dozen times on the way there. Did the wife calling out to him just turn off his brain, did the technician fail to inform him, or did they both not realise the metallic necklace was on him?
hes going to have neck problems if he had lived, 20lbs on the neck will cause spinal deformities, and disc disease.
After reading another article: nope, necklace was just a huge locket on a chain. And the wife said “Keith, Keith, come help me up” which sound to me like:
- wife was making a big fuss for no good reason
- husband obeyed as any good husband would
- technician didn’t inform the husband that his wife would be carted out of the MRI room and failed to react fast enough
If I was married and a bit dumber, I could probably also be lured to my death with my name being called out twice in that fashion. Really depends how good the signage was and how well the husband was informed.
They have extensive screening and education and safeguard procedures, for the patients. I’m guessing hubby skipped (probably wasn’t even offered) all those and just dashed in the door when called. Tech still should have put hubby through “the talk” if he was anywhere close to the door to the room.
MRI is one of the most sci-fi come to life technologies most people are likely to encounter in their lives. Superconducting magnets are about as non-intuitive as it gets, once they get you past the point of your ability to resist the force, there’s no recovery - you’re going faster and faster until the metal hits the housing. There have been multiple accidents with steel oxygen cylinders - for the obvious reason: they’re so common in the environment where MRIs are used, and it’s no small feat to get the cylinder removed.
Uhm, article I read said it was a training accessory and the wife had fallen on the floor and needed help.
Can’t even begin to imagine how the wife feels now.
She probably feels pulled in 2 directions. The weight of calling in her husband to charge in and help her must be great. I’m sure the tech is also crushed that they weren’t fast enough to oppose him entering the restricted area. It’s a tragic set of circumstances that will hopefully attract more awareness of the dangers of entering the MRI area if you haven’t properly prepared.
I had an MRI, many years ago, and had a very small sliver of metal in my finger tip. I didn’t know it was in there still. I felt the pain of it pulling as soon as I left the MRI tech’s control room.
But the husband was called to get her off the table? And she did help in trying to get him unstuck? How are there so many important details to this?
That’s it, as fun as it is to speculate, I think I’ll reserve my judgement until after this has gone to court.
The major failure in this case was lack of education / restraint of the husband. Before he got within 25 feet of the MRI room door, he should have had “the talk” about metal objects and MRIs not mixing, deadly consequences, etc. Other things could have helped, but I suspect the local safety procedures are patient focused and hubby didn’t get properly educated before entering the danger zone.
A 6 pound necklace…
1kg =2.2 pounds. more like a 20 pound necklace.
Again, why aren’t there metal detectors at the entrances to MRI machines everywhere? For the cost of those machines, the cost of a metal detector is peanuts
A - standard metal detectors probably won’t work well right at the MRI room door. Some facilities may have a longer hallway for access and putting one there, far from the actual MRI suite, would make a lot of sense (I think I visited one location that had that layout), but not all facilities are laid out in a way that that could work.
B - the nature of how a metal detector works would probably have negative impacts on MRI image quality if it is too close to the imager - even outside the shield room door.
I did a sort of tour of a couple dozen MRI facilities for a couple of years, the stronger ones all have radio-frequency shield rooms complete with metal / gasketed doors that are supposed to be closed during imaging. Actual practice regarding keeping those doors closed was pretty loose in the places / times I was visiting. And, in the article’s case it sounds like imaging wasn’t in progress so the door was probably standing open…
I’m sorry but it can’t be that hard to have an automated lock on the door. If metal detectors influence the machine, which is possible, then out them further away. Again, with MRI machines costing what they do, these aren’t the prices you would worry about.
not at all practical. a big ol buzzer would have prevented this maybe, but really it’s the relaxed culture around the MRI that let it happen. people need to be told either you don’t go past the big heavy door with the NO METALS sign, or you get all the metal off you now, or both.
Geez, imagine how much it would cost to repair.
This is in the US, so about as much as the exam itself.
Reading more about the story I wonder how much of it is true
You can’t just “walk into an MRI room”, for one
When the MRI is working you definitely can’t just walk in. Nobody is in there because of the radiation, so i doubt they just have an open door policy
Then, when there is an emergency like, you know, someone being strangled with a 9kg necklace on his neck by the machine’s magnetism, you can press the kill switch that will quench the magnet by venting out all cooling liquid. This will damage the machine and is also a very expensive little joke, but it would save the life of that guy. Why didn’t they do that?
It’s a similar story to the guy that went into an MRI with a gun, causing it to fire and kill the guy.
I’m just going through the comments spreading MRI information (source: work with MRI scanners). There is no radiation danger from MRI.
Just a very strong magnetic field that makes having ferrous objects on your person a hazardous thing to do.
I recently tried spreading the word to other MRI folks about the dangers of ‘magnetic eyelashes’, which i learned was a thing from my fiance. Kind of suprised we havent seen any incidents with those, thankfully.
Nobody is in there because of the radiation
What are you saying, there is no radiation in an MRI Scanner. It works with Magnets instead of X-Rays.
Nobody is in there because usually there is only one operator and this guy sits in the next room at his metal computer, which can’t be in the MRI room, looking at the scan results. The doors are closed because MRIs are loud as hell.
He didn’t see new Final Destination movie.
Okay 3 things.
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9 kg is 2.2 lb, which is ridiculous, and can’t be good on your neck. The article says 20 lb, so one of those is wrong. I’m gonna guess the metric one is writing since in America we measure everything in Freedom Units™
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Did the “no metal” warning sign go missing or was he just illiterate?
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That must have been a horrible mess to have to clean up.
9kg is almost 20lbs, which is even more ridiculous
Dude, 1 kg = 2.2. Multiply that by nine and you get 19.8 lbs.
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9 kilograms Necklace?! What kind of necklace is that?
This was not Mr. T.
This was Mr. D Capitated.
Ooh mind you don’t cut yourself on all that edge!
A chain with a 9kg bell weight.
The man, 61, had entered the MRI room while a scan was underway
How was that allowed?
he asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table.
…while the machine was still working? And isn’t that the job of the technician anyway?
the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
Those machines have a kill-switch for a reason.
I call this BS or a very incompetent technician.
Plus a Darwin award for the guy.Couple things:
The magnet is ALWAYS on.
The “kill switch” takes about five minutes to actually deactivate the magnet and it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Not to mention it’s not renewable. Once it his the upper atmosphere, you can’t get it back.
Isn’t it an electomagnet?
it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Oh, right, i forgot human lives have a price in the US.
It’s not an electromagnet, it’s a superconducting magnet. And turning it immediately off makes it melt.
It’s both! MRI magnets are electromagnets that are cooled down to 4 Kelvin using liquid helium. Once they reach those low temperatures, they become superconducting. This way, the magnet isn’t gobbling up tons of electricity to stay at the desired field strength. Instead, the liquid helium needs to be replenished occasionally to keep it at superconducting temperature. Source: I work with MRI scanners.
TIL, thanks
The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.
But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It’s very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.
Not just the helium, there’s a considerable time spent “recharging” the magnet with electricity - many patients will lose access to MRI scan service during the multiple days it is down for recharge.
Dont they loose the access to the machine anyway for few day? Im under impression metal slamming to the machine usually breaks it pretty good.
Well, the thing is, to kill the magnetic field within a few seconds would break the machine, so they don’t do that because it would up the cost of a shutdown from tens of thousands of dollars to several hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the downtime would go from several days to potentially several months.
As it is they “quench” the superconducting electromagnet, which then requires a large amount of LH2 and electricity to get going again. I have heard numbers like $30,000 to get the magnet running again, not counting lost revenue during the many days it takes to get going.
Well the thing is still that the weighted necklace pulled by 1.5 to 3 tesla towards the machine will also put it the machine out if comission from several days to several months.
Also the down time of the machine depend from so many things like availbility of components, logistics and the actual damage happened, that even the most pragmatic operator could never calculate the price of the repair versus the value of the possibility of saving human life.
FFS the saved 30k only buys pretty decent slightly used car. Its sick to even start to weight that kind of money to human life.
And in fact, doesn’t the US have most of the world’s supply of helium?
Its a superconducting magnet that cannot be instantly shut off. I am sorry that the physics of this makes you so angry.
It’s a super conducting electromagnet, and if you quench it instantly pieces would be flying all over the room
I’m sure he was barely trained and had specific instructions to “never push that button!” When you whole life in the country is tied to your employment, it’s every moron for themselves.
Depends on the machine type. Closed bore machines (the vast majority) use supercunducting electromagnets that are surrounded by liquid helium that creates a very strong magnetic field. To demagnetize them requires dumping the helium.
Some open bore machines use electromagnets, but they’re much less common and not as powerful.
So the helium itself becomes magnetized, is that it?
No, the liquid helium cools the magnets to the point where they become superconductive. As to how that works exactly, I do not know. I don’t think I have the math for it.
the helium is liquid, which it only is when it is very very cold.
The superconductor will keep it’s magnetic field forever, as long as it’s superconducting, and it will stay superconducting while it is very very cold.There is physically no way (as in, it is simply impossible, due to how our world works, not money, not people, not technology) to instantly “switch off” the magnet.
it needs to go above a certain temperature, to lose it’s superconducting nature, and it needs to do it at a pace that doesn’t dump a GINORMOUS amount of energy in this magnetic field instantly, because that would be even worse.
the fault here is in allowing anyone with any magnetic metal anywhere near an MRI. And whoever let that happen is going to have a very bad week.
the high powered magnet is always on. it’s never safe to put metal near and MRI.
The kill switch is VERY expensive to press, many thousands of dollars, and even when it does an “instant” magnet quench, by the time you hear the screams it’s all over anyway, the metal has landed on the magnet. Quenching the magnet will make it let go, but it won’t unbreak the neck bones.
Surely 9kg necklace isn’t something you can just sneak around with, how was he allowed to get close enough to an MRI machine in the first place wearing it?
Hospitals aren’t jails or high security government facilities. I could walk around a hospital right now and walk into an MRI room and nobody would physically stop me. I used to work in a hospital and we had a long meeting about signs, because a cleaner didn’t look at the door sign and walked into an MRI room with a metal floor buffer.
I would need an entourage of physiotherapists if I had the bling to roll with a 9kg necklace.
Imagine how dope my rhymes would be though. A man can dream…
So glad to find that Lemmy is even less empathetic than reddit was. Real faith in humanity killer. Shocking how many people decided to comment without touching the article, really proud to be here…
Welcome to the freely accessible internet. I’m sure there are “private message boards” with much more rigorous vetting of their participants, if that’s what you need.
It really sucks, but of course it was an idiot from Nassau county 🙄
For anyone who might not know the area, Nassau County is the place that gave us George Santos. It is burgundy-red, only bested in racism by Suffolk county. The police departments are notoriously racist and will pull you over and interrogate you just for driving a beater. This was one of Trump’s favorite police departments during his first term, he infamously told them to bash people’s heads against their cop cars when arresting them.
Sadly there are many very left leaning people trapped on Long Island, unable to leave because LI is an employment wasteland. It’s not cheap to live on LI either.
Anyways, an idiot from Nassau won’t be missed.
Do not forget it was LI was basically kkk hq for a while.
To be fair this seems like a honest oversight
He entered the imaging room unauthorised. It was an honest Darwin Award
…someone probably should’ve stopped him
You don’t know what you don’t know. He probably wasn’t even thinking about how MRI machines work.
The technician let him in. There was an oversight somewhere but we don’t really know the details. Was the necklace under his shirt, was the receptionist on break, etc etc
Wearing a NINE kilogram necklace.
That’s like approaching a campfire with clothes made out of tinder after soaking in some gasoline and drinking alcohol.
RIP Mr T.
That’s some Final Destination shit right there.
One and only one headstone that includes a mention of a big ass magnet as the cause of death in rap format.
