The Reading Room Podcast: Current Concerns and Challenges with Safety in the MRI Suite

Emanuel Kanal, MD, has lectured about MRI safety for 42 years and has offered MRI safety courses since 2015. However, Dr. Kanal noted in a recent Reading Room podcast that there is currently no mandatory MRI safety education in the radiology curriculum. He added that there is no mandatory oversight for MRI technologists until a safety event occurs.

While MRI safety incidents are rare overall, Dr. Kanal expressed frustration that they still occur and emphasized the need for greater oversight.

“It’s hard to have real statistics, but one thing is for sure: (MRI safety incidents are) not going down over time. That to me is reliable fact and science. They’re not going down. … In my opinion, it’s time that we were more regulated,” said Dr. Kanal, director of magnetic resonance services and chief of the Division of Emergency Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

Are There Defined Minimum Standards for MRI Safety?

Tobias Gilk, MRSO, MRSE, noted that some health-care providers are very diligent about MRI safety but lamented during the podcast that it often comes down to self-policing by individual imaging centers and facilities given the lack of minimum standards and oversight for MRI safety.

“The problem is that there’s no defined floor. There’s no defined minimum that everybody must meet. So we have providers who are up here, but we also have providers who are like: ‘Well, the state’s not going to check on me. My accreditation organization shows up once every three years, and if I just hurry and scurry, and give them a good show for the three days that they’re on site, I can go back to ignoring them for the next 1000 days, you know, before they show up again,’” said Gilk, the founder of Gilk Radiology Consultants, senior vice president of RADIOLOGY-Planning and a board member of the American Board of Magnetic Resonance Safety (ABMRS).

Dr. Kanal compared MRI safety oversight with ionizing radiation. In that case, he noted, regulation was accepted quickly once safety concerns emerged.

“We went right into regulation, which to this day we’re all comfortable with. In fact, we couldn't even imagine a world where ionizing radiation, which may cause harm years and years later, is not regulated. Yet here (with MRI safety), it’s rare to have a problem, but when the problems are there, we still haven’t really done anything significant to … severely drop our incidents,” noted Dr. Kanal.

(Editor’s note: This podcast was derived from a video originally published at the following link: https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/should-there-be-greater-oversight-of-mri-safety- )