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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 5th, 2025

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  • 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.


  • 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.






  • 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…



  • 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.