MRI Question

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Very informative Ken. Unfortunately when I had an MRI a couple years ago when I was going through prostate cancer I didn't get asked anything about metal working. No problems so I guess I didn't have any fragments. My question is if titanium implants cause any problems? Nowadays most orthopedic hardware I'm familiar with is titanium rather than stainless steel.

If Titanium were a problem I'd have been plastered to the Simon Med 3T magnet a long time ago.
I have Titanium in my back and neck.
Titanium is a non-ferrous metal.... a magnetic field will have no effect on it.

Titanium is a non-ferrous metal so the magnet's magnetic field itself won't have any affect on it. The MRI RF pulses used to give energy to the hydrogen atoms could potentially warm the titanium a very little bit but I doubt it would be noticeable but could potentially affect the image quality due the RF absorption in that given area. Don Orr would be more informed about that aspect of it.

Would you believe that some tattoos due to the metals in the inks can affect image quality on an MRI image?

Some of the most difficult image quality problems to troubleshoot, have been caused by some of the strangest things. For example, I was sent to work on a mobile MRI that was having intermittent image quality problems. The cause? Turned out in the scan room, there were several burned out incandescent light bulbs that were burned out. Removing the burned out bulbs from the scan room fixed the problem. It would appear that the broken filaments in the bulb were being flexed and touching during a scan very intermittently and the resulting arc/spark caused a very small RF signal to be generated, producing an "artifact" in the images. In fact, that is how I found the cause. During a scan I happened to notice a very momentary flash of light from what was a burned out bulb. I removed the bulbs, probems resolved.