Should There Be Greater Oversight of MRI Safety?
In recent interviews, Emanuel Kanal, MD, and Tobias Gilk, MRSO, MRSE, noted a lack of point-of-care safety requirements for MRI, a lack of state oversight, and a prevailing lack of minimum standards overall for MRI safety.
Safety in the MRI suite often comes down to self-policing by individual facilities and imaging centers, noted Tobias Gilk, MRSO, MRSE, in a recent interview with Diagnostic Imaging. While he said there are some organizations that are doing brilliant work in this regard, Gilk explained that other facilities are doing the bare minimum given a lack of minimum standards for MRI safety and appropriate oversight.
“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,’” posited Gilk, the founder of Glik Radiology Consultants, senior vice president of RADIOLOGY-Planning and board member of the American Board of Magnetic Resonance Safety (ABMRS).
Emanuel Kanal, MD, who has giving lectures on MRI safety for 42 years and providing courses on MRI safety since 2015, said there is currently no mandatory education on MRI safety in radiology curriculum. He added that for MRI technologists, there is no mandatory oversight for them until an event occurs.
While noting that MRI safety incidents are rare overall, Dr. Kanal expressed frustration that incidents are still occurring.
“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 from science. They're not going down. … In my opinion, it's time that we were more regulated,” maintained Dr. Kanal, the director of magnetic resonance services and chief of the Division of Emergency Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).
Dr. Kanal compared the issue with MRI safety oversight to the quick acceptance of regulation with ionizing radiation once safety concerns came to the forefront.
“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.
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