Um, ok.
Turns out, it's pretty relevant to the situation - especially how the unauthorized access was possible.
This wasn't your typical hospital MRI. This is basically your local tanning salon that somehow acquired an MRI machine.
I don't understand how such a dangerous machine can end up in a place that looks like that.
I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor unless you are physically located in a hospital, preferably the larger the better.
If I have an appendicitis on the way to my normal procedure, I want to be within less than 100M of an emergency room already.
Small scale/small time medical offices were a mistake and I'll never change my mind.
They would schedule you, and you come back.
That's really not true, just because you have one bad example does not mean they all are. In general the non-hospital facilities just do one thing, and they do it very very well.
> I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor unless you are physically located in a hospital, preferably the larger the better.
That's terrible!! Really. Putting the doctor in a hospital makes him a hospital employee usually, you are asking for the end of private practice for Doctors, you are asking for the end of personal relationships with doctors.
I've also known hospitals to refer people to clinics too.
Yes, they're pretty safe nowadays, but there's a lot of energy that gets dumped into a human body during an MRI, and I'd bet my last nickel that we haven't found every way that can cause problems.
Once, I heard a story where some company was trying to get MRI test participants, and if you agreed they offered to print your brain for you as one of the perks.
Turns out, they gave everyone the same brain, like they would just always use the same file when 3D printing it. Probably had a box of pre-printed ones in the back. Dishonest, but I guess how would you ever find out?
The superconducting magnet in an MRI scanner is always on even when not performing a scan.
This was pure and simple negligence by the MRI operators. Access control is the most basic part of MRI safety!
Even if he was not wearing this “chain”, he never should have been allowed to enter the room. He could’ve been wearing a steel wristwatch, had a keyring in his pocket, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m9algh/e...
According to the above post, it's a venting of the liquid helium, which requires ~$25,000 to replace).
Only good for removal of any metal-adorn victims and unintended metallic objects ...
Edit: Since apparently some people need reminding, per the article he had time to say goodbye to his wife before he lost consciousness, this wasn't some liveleak skull splat type thing.
I’m not sure what kind of emergency would warrant allowing metal to pass through when metal is detected, if there is a risk of death for using it.
The risk would be in the false positive during an emergency situation.
This is why JerryRigEverything started his "not a wheelchair" -company[0], who are not selling wheelchairs, but they happen to look a lot like wheelchairs :)
Because it's not certified as an official medical device (a wheelchair), they can sell it for (IIRC) 80% cheaper than Official Wheelchairs.
I don't even want to know what "The Rig", their offroad wheelchair, would cost if it was an approved medical device...
The whole medical cartel is under immediate threat by both LLMs and cheap peptides (e.g. semaglutide). In my view ozempic really is a miracle drug that is unusually effective for autoimmune conditions which I think make up the vast majority of undiagnosed and untreated conditions.
It used to be Dr. Google giving better advice, now it’s Dr, ChatGPT. And at least for my conditions it gives better advice than any doctor I’ve ever been to and I’ve been to a lot.
There should be no need to evaluate random other people because they simply should not be allowed in at all.
Wide: "honey can you come in here and help me since I don't have my walker"
<dude walks right in and gets dead>
Not hard to imagine something like that happening too fast to be stopped, especially if staff is distracted by the transition from running an MRI to getting the patient in/out.
The journalist missed a golden opportunity for education here: most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that. For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to refill the liquid helium, not to mention the real and opportunity costs associated with rendering the machine offline for days or weeks.
If people don't know about the magnet, or don't know that it can't be turned off (or perhaps assume it's "off" because the scan was over, as I would guess happened here), accidents happen.
I thought these days, most MRIs did have an emergency quench button.
So the emergency quench is less useful than it sounds in these situations... it's very likely if an MRI is going to kill you it's going to do it fast enough for it not to be relevant.
I also wonder what the field decay is like. If it takes 15s and it's linear it's much worse than if it's 15s but decays exponentially. You don't need to field to be gone, you need the field to diminish enough to stop strangling the poor guy.
Edit: Per the article that I would like to remind everyone is well worth reading, he had time to say goodbye to his wife, that would seem to me to imply he wasn't tossed hard enough to be incapacitated.
A man getting dragged by the neck and hitting an MRI machine head-first is going to make all sorts of hand movements that his grieving widow might interpret as waving goodbye in hindsight.
The damage was likely done almost immediately; a heavy 20 pound "necklace" is going to apply a lot of crushing force.
My rule of thumb calculation came to 3,000 lbf, which seems like a lot, but perhaps that’s actually accurate.
Figure half that to start since most of the loop is gonna wind up laying flat and only the half of it is prevented from doing so by one's neck. Then maybe cut it by 2/3 again since the sides aren't gonna do a ton of direct squishing. That still leaves you with hundreds of pounds, which roughly aligns with the timeline of suffocation in the article High hundreds low thousand likely would be neck snapping or otherwise instantly incapacitating.
Not disagreeing, just saying the tech running the machine couldn't have known that and should have quenched the machine in case the damage was survivable.
Until that big red emergency button gets pressed to the tune of $25,000 to $50,000 each time (couple that with 1-2 weeks downtime and a messed up scheduled for 1,000 of patients.
In this case, they were going to have to do that anyway. Might as well shut it down right away.
There isn’t a way to instantly turn it off.
If so, I'm curious if that heat causes additional damage to the machine, necessitating a refurbishing or at least some parts replacement.
I now nothing about MDI so please tell me: why does it need to refuel the helium? Aren't the magnets “just” superconductive electromagnets? Why can't the current powering the magnet be stopped?
Edit: thanks everyone for your explanations, I appreciate it.
And with superconductivity, by definition, current flows without resistance; it continues even without energy, so turning off the power won't stop it. Nor will it heat up and decay from resistance. Modern MRIs are well-insulated enough to maintain their field without power from days to weeks.
The only thing that collapses the field is to warm it up to where superconductivity stops, which can be done slow and expensively, or in an emergency, fast and even more expensively.
By venting the supercooled gases in what's called a quench, you can turn it off faster, but the time it needs can depend on the model. It could be 20 seconds, or it could be 2 minutes, which, depending on the emergency, may be insufficient.
A quench itself can be dangerous, though usually less so than a patient pinned to the magnet. There's a chance that poor ventilation can flood the room with helium, causing loss of consciousness in seconds. The increase in pressure can also make it impossible to escape if the door's not built for that. You'd have to break a window. On top of which, it's dangerously cold, and the explosive bang can rupture your eardrums.
"Any change to the current through the magnet must be done very slowly, first because electrically the magnet is a large inductor and an abrupt current change will result in a large voltage spike across the windings, and more importantly because fast changes in current can cause eddy currents and mechanical stresses in the windings that can precipitate a quench [...]. So the power supply is usually microprocessor-controlled, programmed to accomplish current changes gradually, in gentle ramps. It usually takes several minutes to energize or de-energize a laboratory-sized magnet."
You also can't open a switch to stop the current because it's basically a giant inductor, it really wants to keep the magnetic field (and current) constant. Meaning if you suddenly disconnected the winding, it would arc across the gap (continuously, for quite a while until the stored energy was spent).
So what they do is vent/boil off the liquid helium which is keeping the magnet cold, such that it's no longer superconducting and the current will die off. You can't reclaim the helium, hence you need a fresh refill to chill down the magnet again.
So there is no current to turn off. The current in the magnet is running on its own from when it was first supplied. The only way to stop it is to heat up the superconductor.
I thought maybe you could draw it off and use it up somewhere else, but then if I’m remembering right electricity will always take the last of least resistance, so none of it would leave a superconductor. Right?
It also makes me wonder, if someone is ever able to build a warm superconductor, how would we ever stop electricity we’ve put into a system like that?
However the superconducting switch is pretty neat. It's a small section of superconductor between the ends of the coil, but is wrapped in a heating element. When the coils is first powered up the element is heated and the material has a resistance. When the coil is ready the heating element is turned off and the shorted conductor cools down and starts superconducting.
Why the hell are people doing that over again? Nobody asked you to copy-paste a plausible AI-generated response you have no idea about its accuracy.
That some people like do it is depressing, but the fact that you are bragging about that is truly beyond words.
Roughly 90% according to benchmarks. Which means you're learning 10% bullshit.
> the benefits of quickly learning are so high for me that I thought someone else might appreciate it too
ChatGPT has been there for two and a half years already, of course everyone on this forum knows about it, you don't have to tell people how cool it is… Rather you can safely assume that if someone asks a question here, and not as a ChatGPT prompt, it means they doesn't want an answer from ChatGPT!
I didn’t give you an answer from chatgpt. I’m not telling anyone how cool it is. I’ve been here for years and I’m well aware of the level of exposure to LLMs there is for people on HN .
I did give out a warning to people that I had learned something from chatgpt, not from some other source, so they could take it for what it was worth.
I’m so tired of seeing people in other forums try to help someone and having someone give them a shit response. One thing I like about HN is the fact that that doesn’t happen much here. I still think what I wrote in response to your question was helpful and thoughtful. Back up a minute and just think it over, please.
I’d love to see which benchmarks you’re talking about, and if they apply to all three of those specific LLMs, and which version of their models, and if they differentiate topics. My guess is that in the case of LLM output that is a response to a purely factual question, or a response to a question asking a technological question where I present it with something I know occurs but want to know the means by which it occurs, the amount of hallucination is much less than 10%. And if you have some background in the area you are asking about, you can easily filter out some of what is hallucinated, making the learned material well about 90%. But I’m just guessing based on my experience of asking LLMs a lot of questions about both things I already know quite well and others that I don’t. So, which benchmarks are you talking about?
It's a logistics and legislation problem. Hospitals need to be adequately prepared for emergencies and handle backups.
I think a death machine that can't be stopped is an issue.
Thanks for that - and it reminded me of the sad state media is today. I read the same story in about 4 papers and nowhere was written _why_ they couldn't turn off the machine.
Miss the days where journalists actually read what they have written.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg
You push the button, then 15 seconds later the liquid helium is vented through a pipe on the roof of the hospital (it's quite a spectacular display), and then the superconductor starts to heat up and no longer be a superconductor so the current that's been flowing through the coils (they are energized once, when the machine is first installed, and then continue flowing forever so long as the superconductor is superconducting since there's no resistance) and the magnetic field decays to nothing.
It's not an instantaneous process.
Quenching the magnet takes up to several minutes. There are also alarms to warn people to get away because the rapidly expanding helium could displace oxygen in the room.
It’s not about the cost. If there’s an emergency that necessitates pressing the button they’ll be pressing it as soon as someone can reach it. It still takes time for the magnetic field to dissipate.
I would guess a strong magnet takes a while, probably minutes to shed its field.
In a real MRI, I presume there is no capacitor to take the charge, I am guessing the limiting factor is the impedance of wherever the charge is going to go.
Surprise! It turns out there is a reason it should be connected.
https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/everything-you-need-k...
I think the big question here is why they didn’t..
This should be placed on the entrance with big bold letters, I think that a lot of accidents could be avoided by simply providing "WHY" information. I had MRI scan and I wasn't aware that machine was active even when not performing scan and now after knowing that I think that personnel there was very lax with allowing me to enter the room after instructing me to put metal objects away AND without enough emphasis how dangerous it could be if I forgot to do so.
0 - https://www.zzmedical.com/exclusives/mri-warning-wall-sign-m...
So at least in some places, this is the SOP.
Unlike many facilities, we insist everyone strips down to underpants (no bra) and wears a gown. We push quite hard to remove all jewellery (including piercings), but many places do not. It removes a whole category of problems, but is also slow, has an extra cost (laundry) and still patients leave things on, covered up by the gown.
But the percentage of people with something in them is very very high.
We are dealing with a population that by definition has health issues, and I’d estimate that 75%+ have something metal in them.
Sternal wires, fillings, clips, biopsy markers, screws, plates, braces, joint replacements (x6), ports, mesh, vascular stent, urinary stents, breast implants. These are conditionally safe implants from yesterday. If we expanded it to a week we could add heart valves, hearing implants, vsd closure devices and about 20 other implants I’m sure.
We have either memorised or looked up the conditions for each. We pay techs well because we want good staff. Minimum staffing levels include using healthcare assistants and suchlike. There are potential downsides to this approach, particularly around safety.
A strong but still relatively weak "test magnet" seems like it might be a good idea to use on patients --- if it has any effect on any metal pieces they're wearing, tell them the MRI is going to pull on it with a thousand times or more force.
They'll try to talk sense into you, but they're not security guards nor trained in close combat.
Nor are the doors locked or secured, they kinda assume that people don't just rush in and do as they're told.
Also, twenty pound necklace?
"She said he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for weight training."
> She said she had called him into the room after she had a scan on Wednesday.
Part of me wonders why the wife felt empowered to invite her husband, who she knew was wearing a giant metal necklace, into the MRI room after her scan. The hospital would have been very clear with her about the dangers of wearing any metal in the room even when the scanner was not running especially because it's common for women to wear jewelry containing various metals and alloys.
Presumably, the husband would have been part of those conversations as well, and thus, should have refrained from joining her in the room anyway, so he isn't completely absolved of responsibility.
It seems there's plenty of blame to go around.
I once bought a can of coke and put it in my backpack, then I forgot about it. At the airport a few hours later I went through security and didn't think about it at all. No idea why my bag was selected for a manual check. Until he pulled out the soda can. Big (but harmless) do'h moment. People's brains and memories are just wonky like that sometimes; most people have a few "I'm an idiot" anecdotes like that. Even with training by the way: which is why checklists exists for safety critical stuff. "They have been warned about MRI dangers" is pretty meaningless.
The failure is 100% on the facility for not properly controlling access to the MRI room, and people can just walk in apparently(?) And no, a sign or some briefing doesn't cut it.
This is also a risk for absent-minded staff by the way: I don't think I'm the only person who has walked in the wrong room by accident. Or just a small confusion about whether the MRI is operational. Things like that.
It was not in a hospital: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630969
I expect this story to be promoted by people who benefit from sales of x-ray / CT machines though. MRIs and all of their promise for public health could continue to be set back.
Anyway, I’m complaining as someone who personally has turned down recommended medical procedures after checking radiation cancer risk numbers and realizing the radiation risk was being downplayed. When I saw the numbers, to me the cancer risk wasn’t worth it, so I went without a solution to my health problem. Had an MRI been an option, I would have more likely said yes.
Take a look at the Google Street View link someone posted. It's pretty clear this facility -shouldn't- have been able to acquire an MRI machine in the first place.
It also elucidates how such an accident could happen, i.e they clearly don't have the trained staff and protocols necessary given the danger of an MRI machine. It's very likely the poor gentleman didn't understand the immense danger the machine poses.
They are expensive and rare for a reason IMO. Yes it would be great to have more of them but the best place for more of them is within proper hospitals and leveraging economies of scale to share technicians across a fleet of them in a well run facility.
They shouldn't have been, it's a major failure of access control.
Astonishing.
The “could save my life” odds were not very clear and the risk of cancer for that radiation dose had been long ago quantified by scientists, though without considering the immunosuppressants I was taking at the time that elevate cancer risks, making those rates more of a best-case scenario than something to count on. Above all else, the number known to the healthcare facility was the dollar amount to bill to my insurance, with the facility receiving nothing but money in exchange for taking those risks with patients’ lives.
For reference, in exchange for 10 mSv of radiation, a moderate dosage for a CT scan, the cancer risk for a young adult is something like 1/1000 over the course of their life. This means that out of every 1000 young adults who receive a 10 mSv CT scan, 1 would go on to get cancer they otherwise would not have gotten, assuming those 1000 aren’t already at higher risk of dying sooner (this assumption is important to weigh but is not straightforward). Those odds sound low, but if there was a revolver with 1000 chambers and one bullet, would you play Russian roulette with that if your life wasn’t on the line? The risk of cancer for the same radiation dose is much higher for children.
A technically clear answer to this is to use MRIs wherever practical, and to make MRIs more practical as much as we can. Why accept 10 mSv of radiation when you could just do an MRI instead? We should be making MRIs more and more practical. I’m concerned about the potential fear-mongering over times like this one when the facility fails to perform an MRI safely, where the impression people get could be that MRIs are dangerous, when the hazard was really the facility doing a bad job. By contrast, a perfectly performed CT scan will deliver a known radiation dose to the patient every time.
So once you divide by the "lying to people allegedly for their own good and trading away credibility in the process" factor what does that come out to? A semi truck at highway speeds? Those can stop in under 10sec.
Edit: Per the article that you have all supposedly read, he wasn't instantly incapacitated. He was pinned onto/into the machine with enough weight on him that he suffocated over seconds and ultimately died at the hospital. This would have been a "close call" with an E-stop (which they likely had, just wasn't hit soon enough).
Strangulation is one thing, but his throat was crushed; there’s no way around it. That’s not survivable no matter how quickly you’re released.
That sounds like it a bit of an overstatement. 200 tonnes of 747 at 250kph is nearly 500 MJ. Even the biggest, baddest high-tesla MRIs are maybe 10MJ. Which is still a 67-tonne M1 Abrams at 40 mph, so it's not like it's an unimpressive amount of energy!
Sure, a tank can stop from 40mph in not much time due to a very big braking system (https://youtu.be/f5XUQ2beGfM?t=85), but also a tank at 40mph will utterly demolish an MRI suite, patient and all if it drives into it.
If you tweak elements of the case then you can imagine the restaurant winning. As it stands, it's not surprising McDonald's lost.
Maybe this time they won't go on a PR campaign against the victim (it's also the UK where you only get real damages, so they probably won't care enough, no million pound lawsuits here even if it was as serious as the original case, which it isn't).
There's definitely a balance between hot drink being hot and absolutely scalding, especially when you know you're going to be handing it into a vehicle from a window. And it's not an especially onerous thing to turn the temperature down, and as you say, no one likes getting 98 degree paper cup of lava that you can't even sip for 10 minutes. They say they did control the temperature, so maybe it's indeed all on the customers, but I do know I have been given some really hot hot drinks in paper cups that seem excessive.
It's a textbook perfect example of how punitive damages are supposed to work.
The dangers of... hot coffee? Yeah, everyone knows that. That's exactly why they shouldn't have lost to the extent that they did.
It's tragic for the person involved obviously; I get why emotionally the court would feel sympathy for the victim. But objectively speaking its pretty ridiculous for the legal system to be awarding punitive damages for companies exposing people to normal, reasonable risks that everyone encounters as part of everyday life. It creates a culture where businesses have to treat grown adults like children for fear of huge fines if something goes wrong.
At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible for the incident but they got treated like they were 100,000% responsible.
(The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible, it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court so all in all I think the system ultimately worked okay despite the judge's ridiculous initial decision.)
Edit: I misread, it was actually the jury that made the initial ridiculous punitive damages ruling, the judge was the one who reduced it later before it got settled out of court for an undisclosed (possibly still ridiculously high) amount.
80%, according to the jury.
> The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible
Correct, which was factored into the award of actual damages, reducing the $200,000 in damages to a $160,000 award, since it was in a comparative negligence jurisdiction.
> it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court
No, it was the jury that returned the original $2.7 million punitive damage award, which the judge reduced to $480,000, for a total actual+punitive award of $640k in the trial judgement.
The parties did settle out of court while an appeal of the trial judgement was pending.
No, a jury verdict that is not reflected in the trial judgement is not a ruling at all.
There was some rush-to-publish reporting of the jury verdict prior to the ruling which is the source of the whole popular perception of the case, because the misunderstanding of the case has deliberately magnified ao it can be weaponized by people wanting to limit perfectly warranted recovery from actually-at-fault corporatiojs by spinning false tales of out-of-control judgements.
Given subsequent McDonald's incidents of the same type, it was clearly inadequate to serve the function of punitive damages, that is, to be sufficient to dissuade the willful tortfeasor from repeating the same willful tort. (It’s quite likely that the original $2.7 million award would also have been.)
> handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters as part of everyday life.
That's not an argument that the punitive damage award was ridiculous, that's an argument that the jury assessment of comparative negligence that figured into the actual damage award was wrong. Punitive damages are not even in theory about the degree of care that the injured party should have applied, that's the comparative negligence part of actual damages.
I'm open to the idea of awarding damages for harms caused by inherently risky activities as a way of incentivizing companies to take extra steps beyond what is legally or morally necessary to mitigate those risks, but in such cases the damages should be compensatory, not punitive, and use a comparative negligence-like standard based on the degree to which the risks could have been realistically mitigated and the degree to which the plaintiffs are themselves personally responsible.
"Willfully causing injury in this way should not be a wrong at all" is a very different argument than "the damage award was inappropriate for willfully causing injury in this way", so it would help if you would not disguise your argument for the former positions as one for the latter position if you want to have a productive exchange.
My argument is that both of those things are true. Willfully serving hot coffee is not wrong at all, and a punitive damage award is highly inappropriate for unwillfully contributing to the harm caused by woman spilling it on herself.
I don't expect hot coffee to put me in the hospital needing skin grafts.
Note that both customers and store managers had complained many times.
I don't know what to tell you. If you disagree take it up with scientists? I guess?
> In 2001, a six-year-old boy died of a fractured skull at a New York City medical centre while undergoing an MRI exam after its powerful magnetic force propelled an oxygen tank across the room.
There shouldn't exist any metals in the room (that are not the machine itself), period. The smallest metallic object can fly off like a bullet. Everything and everyone that enters the room should be required to be scanned with a handheld metal detector.
How is that possible ? I would think at the very least the door would be locked.
From quick searches I believe it is a for profit company.
https://opennpi.com/provider/1851878409
Granted that probably does not matter, but to me, for profit generally means cut costs, even safety costs to maximize profits.
Not removing it sounds dangerous though.
It would come off ok, this happens from time to time, but that facility needs to lift its game.
Peripheral staff (nurses, anaesthetic techs etc) visiting are the usual source of these accidents.
Even after adding MRI levels of force a 1oz pen is still gonna be something that you can pick up.
* https://fox5ny.com/news/long-island-mri-freak-accident
(Many U.S.A. news services do a better job than BBC News does on U.S.A. stories. But this is the BBC being beaten by Fox, specificially.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNYW#News_operation Fox 5 NY seems that it used to notably be a trailblazer
Many of the Fox Affiliates are still best-in-class local news. (Though it varies from city to city.) The Fox News cable channel lowered the bar on what Americans think news is supposed to be to historic low levels.
But the level of Foxness that I was alluding to was not that of GB News, but rather more that of Reach PLC; which isn't Murdoch-owned, but which runs a whole network of purportedly regional news outlets which turn out to be just localized skins applied to a big syndicated empire, and which BBC News often does better than locally.
One other notorious example is Sinclair Broadcasting [1]. Sinclair-owned stations include all of the major Affiliate Networks in the US and some of the minor ones, but are known for how much they farm politically-biased news content across their platforms, including trying to pass off editorial content as news content.
(ETA: Which is to say that yeah a FOX affiliate gets entertainment programming from what is left of Rupert Murdoch's empire, but could be getting news content from all sorts of places from home-grown proper local journalism to content farms from their real owners.)
[1] A humorous rant on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
I guess cubic growth (?) changes from mild to dangerous so quickly when walking towards a MRI machine that once you realize what happening it's already too late.
There isn't a gradual increase in pull when magnets are involved. My wife used to work for a company whose product involved powerful magnets. For a while they produced a demo kit in which a magnet would hold a large ball-bearing levitated against gravity. That thing was lethal. If the ball-bearing approached the magnet too closely it instantly became a dangerously fast finger-crushing hammer.
No, for "a magnet" it's an inverse cube law. I've often wondered if the force holding a nucleus together is really magnetism. No, physicists you don't need to correct me, I know how off the wall that sounds ;-)
Tell a person there's a tarantula or a cobra in the next room and not a second will go by without them being deeply aware of this information.
Tell them it's a 3 tesla magnetic field and they'll run in carrying a piece of sheet metal and a pocket full of ball bearings.
Entering the MRI room myself I was very familiar with the dangers of bringing metal inside, to the point where I would second guess myself and my own body. "What if my leg bone actually has metal in it for some reason?!"
I had that constant thought for the 15 minutes of my knee MRI (except s/leg bone/body/). Most discombobulating.
https://www.robarts.ca/scholl_group/research/peripheral_nerv...
If MRI scanners are this deadly, everybody should be really thoroughly screened and scanned to be allowed into the room. And even into the room next to it. How can the door of that room open while the machine is still turned on? (Edit: apparently the magnets in these machines usually can't be turned off, which changes the question to: how was he allowed to enter the room at all?)
But wearing such a heavy chain while accompanying your spouse to an MRI scan, is also not the best move.
Spinning rust hard drives are also made with mu-metal as well.
Having an alarm that goes off for a staff member’s bra 200x a day leads to normalisation of hearing the alarm, and the unsafe things gets missed.
Im an MR tech.
And then what if they also have a pacemaker or aneurysm clip?
An unsafe clip is tiny, and it will kill them. You can’t depend on a metal detector.
Technology might help, but people following process is what safety depends on.
If staff follow the rules the MR suite is very safe.
Belts, buckles, bra etc are fine on staff.
A coin is a problem. Hip or knee joint replacement and various screws and plates are fine (some contain some iron).
Like all bad answers, the answer as to whether it’s ok in the scan room is ‘it depends’.
One of the reasons they ask what you do for work is because if you're doing some sort of job that involves working with metal (e.x. cutting pipes, welding, etc) there are extra precautions to take.
I know people who if you tried to explain an MRI to them, would become visibly uncomfortable and search for any way to change the topic.
Expected behavior. Explanations of complex topics are to be rejected if explainer does not have sufficient authority to make behaver hold-still-and-listen.
I know such folk, too, and this is among the thing about people which annoys me to no end. If a MRI tech tried to explain the shit to one such acquaintance, they would try to change the subject like you say. OTOH, if the doctor in charge tries the same, the listener will instead have to zone out. But zoning out is a more expensive operation, as any zooner knows. (Which is why they hold doctors, lawyers, and other semi-priests in high reverence, up to pushing kids to take up these rather joyless professions to the exclusion of all sense.)
Peeps here equally well-behaved other way round tho. C-f "mal" = 0. Geez I really needed to witness the absolute by-the-book Freudian slip that can be found at 1:55 of one of the probably infinite interview cuts, then have MRI safety explained to me by hacker noosers on their Monday morning.
Consider the “Things I Won’t Work With” column. There is a healthy degree of respect for various compounds that’s learned with experience. This is similar to the way that (properly trained) electricians work with electricity, and nuclear plant techs work around radioactive material.
Apparently it's not an issue, even if you do have them.
I have a titanium plate in my head, so it's not magnetic.
When the MRI tech asked if I had any metal in me, I said I had titanium on my skull.
She asked if I was sure it was titanium.
I knew it was, but I was nervous, so I said, "I think so."
She half-joked, "Well, if it's not, we'll find out real quick."
It was titanium.
But they never really double-checked or anything.
Part of me thinks that because of my age, she could tell it wasn't iron or anything dangerous.
But another part of me feels like she honestly didn't care that much and meant it when she said we'd find out fast.
Its not like in the movies where you have to be right up on it, and certain materials may attract at higher rates depending on the amount of ferromagnetic materials affected by the flux.
Field flux lines may also be warped depending on the geometry so its possible the drop-off wasn't calculated properly during initial facility design, or it changed.
Walking through the wrong door can have consequences as the news has reported.
The effect for magnetic fields is that generally once the field is enough to obviously move an object it's already accelerating uncontrollably.
30,000 gauss sounds a lot scarier.
A little rare earth magnet can easily have a 1T field at its surface, but some inches away the field is negligible.
Sounds like Darwin Awards material
sounds like people wear them all day, so it would more be a case of "why would i take this off?"
I would have thought the dozens of huge warning signs around the MRI room would have tipped him off but i guess warning fatigue is a thing
But you need to seriously piss off the tarantula for it to engage in a fight with an opponent our size. Most of them are sweet and just want to get on with their tiny lives. They are well aware we are not food. Poisonous snakes, on the other hand, tend to be much less chill. Much like wasps, they seem to enjoy causing pain and suffering.
> Poisonous snakes, on the other hand, tend to be much less chill. Much like wasps, they seem to enjoy causing pain and suffering.
Eh, I don't know about that. For example, sea snakes, despite being incredibly venomous, are actually pretty timid creatures.
Also:
https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...
Intellectually, you can think that "If a jet can move a plane, it can move me through space", but you never experience a fan even close to that in real life.
How difficult would it be to install metal detectors to give an alarm to people who enter. I have had a few MRIs and they did seem too trusting that I properly remembered to remove anything magnetic.
I'm going by; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4lxusff1c "The Surprising Reason Babies Are NOT Afraid of Snakes | Secret Science"
They are an imperfect solution. They may help, but dependence on good practice remains.
Oh, wait, you still want them willing to go near the machine? That complicates things a bit ;)
People think they can do anything they want nowadays.
The magnet is always on. His wife was in the room. Unless you're previously aware of the dangers of an MRI machine it looks like any other exam room with some equipment in it. It's up to the staff to inform and keep people out and enforce that. IMHO he should not have even been in the outer room wearing a chain like that.
> Melonie Longacre, VP of Operations at Northwell Health, explained MRI safety protocols, emphasizing the importance of multizone procedures to ensure safety around the powerful magnet.
> "Zone I is just for awareness that there’s an MRI in the vicinity, Zone II is the patient screening zone where they get screened. Zone III is the post-screening zone, and Zone IV is the actual magnet room," she said. "It’s important to be educated and safe."
It's unclear if Nassau Open MRI (where this incident took place) had similar safety protocols. I'm guessing not.
[1]: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/long-island-mri-freak-accident
Step 2: Lock metallic decapitation device in place.
big fat metal chain + big fat powerful magnet = disaster.
In fact, whenever I hear MRI I instantly think dental fillings. You’d think the patients and their handlers would instinctively think about all the metal they carry. How could big fat metal chain on neck not come to mind?
The same questions are being asked: how come anyone can enter a NICU? How could the parents let an unsupervised child roam the hospital? How come no one intervened? The worst part is that other parents had complained about the unsupervised child the day before.
Failures all along... that's often how accidents happen.
Freak accidents will always happen, and if mitigation is simple and cheap, we should do it. But as soon as we get into the territory of "NICU doors need to be locked with keycard access" (causing every doctor and nurse to do a badge scan 40-50 times a day) then I think it's ok to have 1 infant death every 50 years globally because of it.
Yeah, sometimes enough fractional close calls add up (usually to a big lawsuit) and policy changes without and death, but don't bet on it.
But, on the other end of the spectrum, having all sorts of absurd policy and procedure because someone might die so incredibly rarely we can't quantify it is terrible too.
For quoting the article : « According to the US Food and Drug Administration, MRI machines have magnetic fields that will attract magnetic objects of all sizes - keys, mobile phones and even oxygen tanks - which "may cause damage to the scanner or injury to the patient or medical professionals if those objects become projectiles". » the choice of words from both the bbc and the FDA don't really convey the risks.
Anyway there are very surprising issues in what is described : why did the wife needed her husband's help to get help although it is the role of the technicians ? Why was the husband in a place where he was able to hear his wife and not being prepped for MRI ? Why was it possible for him to enter ? And why wasn't the technician able to stop him entering ?
This is probably the main one. I could completely understand wanting the assistance of a loved one for mundane things like standing up.
Although to your “not prepped for MRI” point, it is kind of wild that someone with a 20 lbs chain around their neck would be allowed even on the same floor as a MRI machine. Although last time I saw one in person, the door to the room did have some pretty blunt warning text in large print.
I guess maybe the MRI machine might interfere with metal detecting?
Why not just control access to the room behind a metal detector? It would be really simple, but effective. I don't think any MRI should be allowed to operate without this basic level of protection.
Literally no one disagrees with you on this, and most (if not all) hospital administrators will say they already do it the way you suggest. I'm pointing out that the actual implementations I'm aware of are often ineffective because they use administrative rather than engineering controls, and this is a critical distinction people need to be more aware of when interacting with dangerous systems. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to wildly overestimate compliance rates with administrative controls, even ignoring any possibility of deliberate noncompliance.
A lot of fatal accidents are like that - a series of small mistakes nobody notices, each individually harmless, followed by THAT ONE BIG MISTAKE that ends up killing someone (or a lot of people).
"nah man, gotta hit my 5k steps wearing 20lb for my fitness goal"
"ok, well just don't go in the room"
"sure"
The kind of interaction that many people will pretty much forget having within the hour.
I love this old GE training video around the time of MRI's introduction to the medical market. Even the oldest machines could show some significant power back then.
Watching the scale attached to a pipe wrench pulling some significant weight on a wrench will help show the forces that a 20 pound chain would have made...
(Oh, and stay for the 'old custodian' tale in the intro of this one...)
They replaced the lens with a very long throw one so the projector could be located far away and bolted to the wall. It still had some steel components inside, but the manual made it very clear you were not supposed to open the case while in the same room with the magnet. No other manual I've read has warnings that trying to change a light bulb could kill you.
¹it was designed to be used within the same room as the MRI, but not to go into the magnet bore itself. You were supposed to securely mount it at a distance where the field strength was less than 100 gauss. Since it still contained steel, there were still warnings all over that "this device may become a projectile" if you got too close to the magnet. Installation must have been a bit nerve wracking!
They almost certainly just selected a drywall anchor based on the rating advertised on the package and sent it without any more thought, their ass was covered.
Big picture people who take a step back think about what they're doing don't tend to find themselves installing projectors in hospitals, or if they do they aren't there very long.
They're installed for fMRI research, to show stimuli to study participants.
A fist-sized powerful magnet that's next to impossible to straight-up pull out of ANYTHING. You need to slide it carefully and NOT let your fingers get in between it and anything else.
Now imagine a magnet that's infinitely more powerful than that.
The difference is the size. Even a large magnet only hits that 20g force over an inch or two. An MRI pulls at that force over a full foot or more; equivalent to dropping the object from 20'+. Worse, the MRI starts pulling at 5 or 10 feet away. Objects can experience a tremendous amount of uncontrolled acceleration in fractions of a second.
It's not like a black hole- unless you are trapped under something very large, the crushing force is substantial but not incredible. In fact inside the tube the gradient is actually smaller than the entrance of the tube- you are pulled in strongly, but once inside the tube you are pressed against the wall somewhat less forcefully. Instead it's like an invisible waterfall, and any metal will be swept away in it, fast enough to put holes in you.
Which makes sense since it's about the same timeline of death and outcome you'd expect from an industrial accident involving big industrial chain at a hundred pounds per link or whatever.
Because, you know, when you LOSE YOUR HEAD, you tend to die instantly. Even if it’s not something doctors tend to see often.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/new-york-mri...
> He endured “a medical episode” at that point which left him in critical condition at a hospital, and he was pronounced dead a day later, police said.
> Adrienne told News 12 that her late husband had suffered several heart attacks after the incident with the MRI machine and before his death.
He is able to talk, you can make out his words, but he is clearly choking or being strangled. He was fully sucked into the machine. There was a very strong guy trying with everything to pull him out. He made some pretty sad and harrowing words when he realized he wasn't going to make it. Again, the video is out there if you really want to see it. I do NOT recommend it though.
That aside, you don't need ferromagnetic substances for it be manipulated by magnetic fields. Anything conducting can be moved around by fluctuating magnetic fields. Even non-conducting paramagnetic or diamagnetic substance will eventually respond to very high strength magnetic fields - just not at the 'feeble' strengths of an MRI machine's superconducting magnets. Here is something I collected previously on the same fun topic: https://phanpy.social/#/fosstodon.org/s/111504060685437481?v...
People have gone in MRIs with phones with no adverse effects, except maybe damaged speakers. It's more likely that the MRI is going to damage the electronics than it will physically rip it off you.
It's all about the amount of ferrous material involved. It can take your keys of your pocket, but I doubt you can't peel them of it.
I believe many articles are leaving these parts unsaid due to sensational assumptions they benefit from in virality.
EDIT: source https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-re...
While the MRI angle makes it "newsworthy," there are many ways in which a chain might be caught and cause injury if it does not disconnect at a lower energy level than the minimum amount of injury the wearer is willing to accept.
I never had anxiety in my daily practice in the OR but anesthesia in the MRI suite ALWAYS provoked anxiety because:
1. I had to anesthetize the patient in the sub-basement, two floors below the main OR — where there were always other anesthesiologists able to help in an emergency. In the MRI suite, no one could hear my silent screams if I got in trouble nor were there knowledgeable extra hands to, for example, squeeze the breathing bag if I needed to prepare for an emergency intubation.
2. Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the MRI machine room was closed and locked, I could only monitor my unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window. Sure, I had monitors for EKG and oxygen saturation outside the MRI room, near the control board where technicians operated the machine, but the automatic blood pressure cuff inflator dial on the anesthesia machine was inside the room and hard to see through the dark glass.
3. It was my good fortune to never have had an emergency in the MRI suite, but events such as that reported above in the OP happened from time to time in hospitals throughout the U.S. and were occasionally reported in the anesthesia literature with the expected cautionary advice. Many more events occurred than were reported.
This also doesn't do anything against the (static) magnetic field, which is really hard to block except with material like steel, which don't make very good windows. Newer machines have a counter-magnet to redirect the field to extend less far from the machine.
benzodiazepines?
I understand it is caused the 'donut of death' for that reason.
Fatal mistakes usually stay within hospital departments and are discussed at length in regular confidential Morbidity and Mortality conferences.
You are allowed to put patients under general with no one else present? That doesn't seem like it should be possible
Every day in ORs around the world manuy thousands of anesthesiologists — and CRNAs where approved — put patients under general with no one else present. Are you proposing that two anesthesiologists be assigned per patient, like scheduled airlines?
Should piloting a plane solo be outlawed?
If, after three years of residency and roughly 1,500 cases done under supervision, many more done without supervision, a written examination, and an oral examination, you aren't qualified to administer a general anesthetic solo, then you have NO business giving general anesthesia no matter how many other qualified or unqualified others are present.
> In the MRI suite, no one could hear my silent screams if I got in trouble nor were there knowledgeable extra hands to, for example, squeeze the breathing bag if I needed to prepare for an emergency intubation.
Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?
Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though you've planned it all according to guidelines. What he's saying is that when shit hits the fan, he's really grateful if someone's there to assist with basic moves while he's trying to control the more pressing matters. I can relate.
>he's really grateful if someone's there to assist with basic moves while he's trying to control the more pressing matters.
I think they were saying theres literally no one there to help.
>Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though you've planned it all according to guidelines.
Emblematic of the broken US healthcare system. The guideline creates an easily preventable scenario where the patient is highly likely to die for no real reason.
It must certainly be allowed, as it greatly benefits some patients. Believe me, I'd be most happy if I was forbidden to enter MRI rooms.
> I think they were saying theres literally no one there to help.
This might happen quite infrequently, and usually just for a very short time. Problem is that others have their own jobs to do, and sometimes you get unlucky at just the worst time. It's certainly not common that no one's there, and theres almost always someone near. But since you can't leave the patient, it might be that you have to yell for 20-30s before someone notices you're in trouble.
> Emblematic of the broken US healthcare system. The guideline creates an easily preventable scenario where the patient is highly likely to die for no real reason.
I'm not currently practicing in the US. I don't think that's a fair assessment. Guidelines are born in patient blood, and although adaptation is a must deviating from guidelines still remains a bad idea most of the time.
Is this for patients that can’t stay calm? It seems to me there would be plenty of far safer ways to sedate them. Example: some Xanax
Hey now, there's a very good reason for this. The rich people who own the medical insurance company need their third yacht.
See also: first responder at countless Code Blues around the hospital (700 beds) where I did just that. On average once a month x 38 years.
>Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?
P.S. LOVE the snark!
Pretty much every civil aviation authority in the world requires two pilots on commercial flights.
And in the age of pretty good long-distance telemetry, I'm sure that 99% of the time there's not much need for the second pilot in a big jet. It's that 1%.
Some of those commercial ops include single pilot IFR in Class G, into dirt airstrips at night.
Why was the door locked?
It certainly shouldn’t with people inside.
I work in MRI.
The doors can also lock (I'm pretty sure they are required to be locked when qualified personnel are not present) but usually they are not locked when the scanner is staffed and in use.
I do wonder if someone being in the room is enough to distort a scan? As there's no ionising radiation danger, it always seemed odd that you were left alone in there.
I understand there's magnet safety worries, but if the anaesthetist is knocking someone out on the scanner bed, doesn't that prove them magnet safe?
Many sites screen individuals to accompany patients. It's fairly common in pediatrics.
If by "the above case" you are talking about the accident that happened, it has nothing whatsoever to do with anesthesia in the first place. It was an outpatient knee MRI performed without anesthesia at a free standing clinic (not a hospital). Based on the wife's description of what happened, the technologist brought her husband into the room at her request to help her up after the scan had finished and the technologist failed to screen him.
I'm not even thinking of this incident. My base query is why MRI patients seem to always be alone in the room. Ignore all the anaesthetics too; I've seen them refuse to let a nervous patients family member stand in the room during the scan even though it could completely calm the patient... that's what seems odd to me. This is based on UK hospital experiences; I'm not sure if it's universal.
The incident in question is sad and seems avoidable, but I hadn't even got that far yet; I got stuck on the top(ish) comment of "(Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the MRI machine room was closed and locked,) - I could only monitor my unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window". My thinking went "surely being in the room would be better" -> "they never seem to let anyone in the room" -> "why not?" - and then I confused you and we ended up here :)
We do let family members in, we just try to avoid it. Having extra people there is extra problems, extra safety issues and makes everything slow. ‘It completely calms’, is rarely true. We are good at getting patients through scans - we do it 50x a day.
I worked somewhere that had a lot of MR scanner in the area and the coast guard sent a letter as someone was routinely leaving the door open and messing with the airwaves.
MRs have powerful transmitter - which is why you heat up during imaging.
It should be lockable when no staff are present and no one is in there.
It just needs to close when in use.
There isn't a restraint strong enough to prevent image degradation from movement. Clench and unclench a muscle group and you'll ruin images through that area.
Breath-holding can be controlled via the anaesthetist. For example, cardiac imaging on young humans requires a GA. Tying down a kid to force them into a scanner would be brutal? No thanks. Many are just terrified, and will remember the event, making subsequent scans even harder. This doesn't seem like something anyone would advocate.
I have a lot of sympathy. I'm pretty good in confined spaces usually, but even after multiple MRIs it's still a surprisingly stressful experience. The buildup and safety questions make the pre-experience worrying. The aperture is surprisingly small. Depending on the scan, part of you might be caged in place, and it's extremely noisy and you're aware of a lot of mass and power spinning very close to your face.
Also, some of the radiologists don't help. It's not deliberate, but they're entirely desensitised to the experience (and often haven't actually gone through it themselves; which again seems crazy considering the lack of radiation). My last scan was of my lower back, but they were already set up (from the previous scan) to feed me in head first rather than feet first. From their point of view it saves a bit of faffing with the software and moving the pillow to the other end. From a patients point of view it makes all the difference in the world; it's a very different psychological experience having your legs inside with your head free, vs being stuck head first in something and having it whizz past next to your head.
I've had a goodly (read unhealthy) number of CT and MRI scans and I'm bright enough to understand which one is significantly more detrimental to my long term health. I'm also aware that on a subconscious almost cellular level, it's the benign one that absolutely terrifies me every time...
I can certainly imagine there are many similar scenarios where it's just not possible for a patient to be completely still, or it's better for them to avoid excessive rescans.
I work as a programmer, but it was and still is my hobby. And I could have ended up in a different line of work. In which case I'd most likely still be here but with a different day job experience.
Last time I had a major surgery the anesthesiologist at Stanford was also simultaneously a full time employee of Apple. (At the time we were competitors; we figured out during surgical prep that we had friends/colleagues in common.)
Similarly, while working at another FAANG company, one of my colleagues was simultaneously a practicing MD (PCP) at Stanford. He later left both jobs, to start own biz.
At one point he referred me to another Stanford doc who was simultaneously the founder of a diagnostic-tech startup, which sadly has since fizzled.
Lastly, I know a practicing anesthesiologist married to a serial entrepreneur who's built and sold stuff you've heard of. They or some of their hundreds of employees may be here, dunno. Won't out them.
This is international news, which means that this kind of event is extremely rare. People are often pretty dumb, and magnetic metal is common, so that means that the existing precautions are very effective. There's probably room for improvement, but there isn't some blisteringly obvious thing that's been overlooked that would save many lives.
Per the article, the chain was stupid heavy because it was gym/weight training stuff, he was tossed and pinned to the machine where he suffocated, he died at the hospital.
"It was also not the first time that the employee had seen her husband's weight that he used for training, she said."
"She claimed an employee and her husband previously "had a conversation about it before: 'Oh that's a big chain'"."
"I'm saying, 'Could you turn off the machine?" she said. "Call 911. Do something. Turn this damn thing off!'"
This is really so sad, reminds me some facts about ancient Roman history and how everyone kept trying to sue somebody else for some easy money.
By the way, a much larger responsibility for CT/MRI centers remains a patient's allergic reaction to the contrast medium infused intravenously.
Tragedy all around. Feel bad for that lady.
Door should only open if no metals detected.
Thus, it makes sense for regulations to mandate such a life-saving metal detector.
I think we have way too many regulations as it is, and it's bringing society as a hole down.
It's a slow process. There is an enormous amount of energy in that magnet which has to go somewhere.
Perhaps the companies that sell or install them need to start stating it will need double the amount of room:
The room where it is installed and a room where you pass through to get to it. The pass through room can check your magneticness before it unlocks the door.
There is always a solution.
The exact setup varies, but it's most often a metal detector you have to go through at the door with an alarm.
>he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for weight training.
That is not what any reasonable person would call a "necklace." Yes, metal and MRIs don't mix well, but normal jewellery won't be able to generate enough force to kill you. It might actually be more dangerous due to inducted currents heating the thing up and giving you burns.
Also, the person wearing the 20lb chain was not the patient. There was an access control failure (someone peeking their head into the room?) combined with the extraordinary amount of metal resulting in a lot of pull.
Good thing they sourced that fact, I never would have guessed.
The "OFF" switch vents the coolant (helium) outside the hospital so the electromagnet stops superconducting and can turn off.
Outside the hospital it would look something like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/krMbFT0Ums0
Is there information on why they didn’t quench?
They teach anyone operating MRI or even sitting by - in the first instruction lesson - that if life is at danger in relation to the magnet, you quench (=release the helium to stop the magnet).
Google AI said steel isn’t affected by magnetic fields and the effects of gravity would dominate.
Realistically, an 18 pound chain will be pulled towards such a magnetic field with a considerable force, topping off somewhere around a couple hundred pounds.
Isn’t there something like an airport scanner before you get to an MRI. Is it thought that people just wouldn’t do this sort of thing?
jleyank•6mo ago