A 61-year-old man has died after being sucked into a MRI machine at an medical centre in New York while he was wearing a heavy metal necklace, reports the BBC.
He had apparently entered a room at Nassau Open MRI on New York’s Long Island without permission as the MRI machine was running, Nassau County Police Department said.
His wife told local media she had called him into the MRI room after her scan – but his metal chain resulted in him being hurled hurled towards the machine when he walked in. She and the technician tried to pull him off, without success.
Officials say the incident “resulted in a medical episode” and he was later pronounced dead.
MRI machines use a strong magnetic field to produce detailed images, and patients are typically asked to remove metal items and change out of their clothes before undergoing scans or going near the machine.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister said her husband Keith had “waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp”.
She said she was getting an MRI scan on her knee and had asked her husband to come in to help her get up afterwards. He was wearing a 9kg chain with a lock that he used for weight training.
She said the visit on 16 July was not her and her husband’s first time at the MRI facility, nor was it the first time staff had seen her husband wearing the chain.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration, MRI machines have magnetic fields that will attract magnetic objects of all sizes – keys, mobile phones and even oxygen tanks – which “may cause damage to the scanner or injury to the patient or medical professionals if those objects become projectiles”.
In 2001, a six-year-old boy died of a fractured skull at a New York City medical centre while undergoing an MRI exam after its powerful magnetic force propelled an oxygen tank across the room, and in 2018, an Indian man died after being sucked into an MRI machine at a hospital in Mumbai, after he entered the room carrying an oxygen cylinder.
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