Long Island man wearing 9kg-metal necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
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You should probably reread the articles if you still think it's an actual necklace and not a weighted exercise tool.
I'm not gonna continue with this since you think trusting a professional is equivalent to trusting a stoplight
It's the same thing as a stoplight. The green light just means it's legal to go, not that it's safe.
Same goes with your blind trust in professionals. Medicine is the last place you'd do that.
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What an unfortunate chain of events
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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.
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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.
not at all practical
Simple question: why?
You put in a metal detector, and hell, a second door that won't open if metal was detected. These aren't the costs compared to the cost of a single MRI machine.
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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.
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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.
The machines are actually built pretty tough for the impact. I think they're designed to resist a flying steel oxygen cylinder and just crack some plastic cover parts. One place I visited told a tale of attempting to remove the stuck O2 cylinder using a come-along and strap, but I believe they were unsuccessful and had to quench anyway to get it off.
could never calculate the price of the repair versus the value of the possibility of saving human life.
If necklace guy was being choked by his chain and quenching the magnet would have saved his life, I'm 99.99% certain that any tech I have ever spoken with would have quenched the magnet without hesitation. However, if the chain snapped his neck while dragging him across the room like being jerked in a hangman's jig, quenching is far too late to be of help - I'm pretty sure they would push the $30K button anyway, just out of respect for the dead and to make removing him slightly more dignified, also because they're not likely to get that steel ball off without quenching.
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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.
it can’t be that hard to have an automated lock on the door.
No, but human factors dictate: it can be that hard to use the lock properly.
out them further away.
Some places do this, other places don't have a good layout to make metal detectors a practical thing for the MRI suite.
with MRI machines costing what they do, these aren’t the prices you would worry about.
Often (depending on location), the most expensive part of the MRI suite isn't the device, but the room itself.
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What an unfortunate chain of events
You son of a bitch lol
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Metal detector on the door to the room.
this seems like the obvious solution to me and it's kinda wacky that it's not already standard, just have a loud as fuck alarm go off if metal goes through the first door leading to the general scanner area.
just gotta have enough distance between the detector and the scanner, so there's time for people to intervene.
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The dectector and the variable field (that induces the localized measurable changes) stop between scans, but the static magnetic field is kept up.
As long as you keep up the superconductitvity there is basically no electrical loss in the coils. Dialing the magnetic field down would require pulling out the energy, and reinjecting new energy to get the field back up. That's the slow part, because injecting current quickly would heat the coil above superconductivity, leading to a quench.
I'm not sure how energy is withdrawn in the ordinary shutdown procedure, but I expect it is exchanged into heat and vented to the outside air in some way, rather than reinjected into the grid in a usable form. (The latter would require an inverter to turn the DC back into AC synchronized to the grid, probably would increase complexity by too much). So I suspect it would be wasteful too.
i think the easiest way to think about it is like a very well insulated freezer, it takes hours to defrost it and then it takes hours to build the cold back up.
