From the October 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Problems also arise once the room is in use, says Krachon.

“A year or two later, someone who may not recognize the fact that this is a special room decides to attach something like a picture frame,” says Krachon. “They don’t appreciate or recognize that they’re dealing with a surface that needs to be treated carefully, and end up creating another opening that can become a problem.”


Though careless mistakes like attaching a picture frame to the wall are rare, problems with the shielding around the doors are far more common.

“The shock of the door opening and closing makes the door fasteners vibrate, and they can eventually break,” says Krachon.

Shielding integrity can also be compromised if doors become jammed or aren’t kept clean, ETS-Lindgren’s Kellogg reports.

Shields need routine maintenance, too
Once a shield is installed and has been tested by the shielding company both during installation and after, many facilities don’t test it again until there’s a problem. When facilities do test, some believe all that’s really needed to test an RF shield is a portable radio. If it can’t get a signal in your MRI room, that means radio frequencies are successfully blocked. But if a station does make its way through, that means your shield is in serious trouble – and you might have to deal with scanner downtime while it gets fixed.

Neither shielding manufacturers nor OEMs require RF shielding after the shield is initially installed, but shielding experts say it certainly can’t hurt, and may help prevent problems or deal with issues before they get worse.

Profeta says that often, image artifacts or noisy images are written off as occasional glitches, when a compromised shield is the real problem.

“We once worked on a mobile MRI that was located in the middle of an Indiana corn field. It was nowhere near any radio stations and a place where one would expect very little RF noise in the environment, but every once in a while the MRI images would be completely ruined by RF noise artifacts,” says Profeta. “The shield was tested and obviously compromised. We worked at night to allow the center to scan during the day, and one day the artifact appeared. We quickly realized the source was the ignition on the facility lawn tractor, explaining why the artifacts were so intermittent.”

Though many end users do not think of performing routine maintenance on shields, doing so can save image quality and money in the long run.

“Self testing with a radio or cell phone may prove to be a qualitative process but it really doesn’t qualify the shielding effectiveness,” says Profeta. “Cell phones and radios fall out of service well before the limits required for the MRI, so just because there is no signal doesn’t mean the room meets the specifications. If a shield compromise is suspected, get an experienced professional to check it out.”

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