This will prevent healthcare staff from assisting or caring for patients during imaging, and will mean that some patients who cannot be imaged without this care - perhaps because they are young, elderly, frail or confused - will either be denied imaging or have to undergo an alternative procedure using x-rays. It will also ban interventional MRI and some forms of functional imaging in their entirety, and endanger the pre-eminent position of Europe in MRI research.
The research also shows that members of staff walking as slow as 1 m/s within about 0.5-1 m of an MRI scanner will exceed the limits, even when the scanner is not in use. This problem will impact on installation, servicing, cleaning and calibration of equipment, as well as on patient care. This could make all uses of MRI essentially impractical.
The study has been published as two papers in the Proceedings of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and is available on www.allianceformri.org -
