MRI accidents

I spent hours (literally) this week, stuffed into an MRI machine, getting whole-body scans done. Won't know the outcomes until next week, but in talking about it to some of my colleagues, it became clear that they'd never seen or heard of the interesting occupational safety aspects of operating an MRI. The "M," of course, stands for "magnetic," as in "magnetic resonance imaging," and that implies big honkin' magnets, run off supercooled helium, not just line power. So the magnets stay on all the time, and that means you really should keep ferrous materials like, say, office chairs, out of the room. See the pictures below for examples.



The object in the shot on the right appears to be an IV pole; hope it wasn't hooked up to a patient when they wheeled him or her in.