GoodDoctor wrote:I have seen some of those crazy incidents over my years of practice. IV poles getting "sucked" into the MRI room when the door was opened, a bunch of other debris type incidents. I came damned close to one mistake myself. I had a head trauma patient come in and I needed to monitor intracranial pressure but his ventricles in the brain were collapsed so I couldn't pass a silicone tube to measure the pressure. The alternative is to screw an external metal housing to the skull and pass a strain pressure sensor. We needed to get an MRI of the brain, and I had looked up the manufacturer"s data sheet concerning the metal housing and the data sheet stated the housing was MRI compatible. The radiologist was skeptical, so I called the manufacturer and talked to the MD who had "certified" this housing as safe and asked him what temperature did the housing get to while in the MRI (1.5 Tesla units) and he stated it was 57 degrees Celsius. OOPS. That's about 135 degrees Fahrenheit (think medium rare). Needless to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, not just the obvious large metal objects flying into these units.
Right after I graduated college (1974) I had a stapendectomy, which is the replacing the stapes bone in the ear with a piece of wire. When I needed to have a MRI in 2008 to evaluate my rotator cup, I called the doctor who had done the surgery, fortunately the son had taken on the practice and my records were still available, to get the composition of the wire and would they send me a letter stating such. The wire was safe, but it was still a little nerve wracking when the machine started.