by
Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | September 15, 2015
From the September 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Another time a patient had a staple stuck in the tag on the back of their shirt from the drycleaner, which showed up as an artifact in the image, but didn’t cause any adverse effects. These kinds of harmless incidents are far more common than adverse events, but the key to eliminating all of them entirely is in education, according to Robberstad, and she says vigilance is key.
Ferromagnetic detectors
Ferromagnetic detectors are similar to the metal detectors found in traditional security settings, but will only signal magnetic material. For MR safety, these detectors can be vitally important. Mark Keene, CTO of Metrasens, is credited with developing these detectors, and credits his invention to a tragedy.
“Six-year-old Michael Colombini died in July of 2001 because someone took a sealed oxygen cylinder into a magnet room and he was in the scanner at the time and the cylinder struck his head, and he died from massive hemorrhaging,” recounts Keene, a citizen of the UK who happened to be in the U.S. at that time. The tragedy resulted in rapid innovations by Keene, who called on his military research background in submarine and land mine detection to create the first ferromagnetic detector prototype in November of the same year.
MR-safe metal equipment is always being developed, and includes aluminum IV poles, specially designed gurneys and certain patient monitoring equipment. Distinguishing these items from MR hazardous items is not always easy with the naked eye. Keene recalls a few months ago when a young child with a programmable shunt valve in their head was being admitted for an MR. The technician doing the screening stopped the procedure because — for reasons unknown at the time — the detector was going off. Afterward, when the presence of the shunt valve came mto light, the team realized a potentially life-jeopardizing event had been prevented.
Metrasens, and other companies, are working to improve their detection abilities while also cutting down on troublesome false positives — which can cause alarm fatigue and lead to carelessness. “There’s a temptation to make the equipment more elaborate and more complicated, but we don’t really want to go that way because there is so much complicated equipment in the MR environment already, so, in a sense, it’s about making it simpler and easier and more intuitive to deal with,” says Keene.
Certifying MR ‘pilots’
For Kanal, MR professionals can learn a lot from airline safety. “The No. 1 cause of adverse aviation events is pilot error, and the one thing we don’t certify in MR is the pilot,” he says. There are software certifications, and hardware certifications, and the ACR has an MR accreditation program that ensures the safety and upkeep of an imaging facility — but there is no standard accreditation to distinguish the best people for conducting the exams. Kanal helped form the American Board of Magnetic Resonance Safety (AMBRS) last year to help meet that need.
