Kopp Development Inc. said it was selected by the military earlier this year to outfit a group of mobile MRI trailers heading to Afghanistan with ferromagnetic detectors.

The detectors are safety features that sound an alarm if personnel try to bring objects into the scanning room that can be drawn toward the magnet at high speeds and turned into dangerous projectiles. A tiny paperclip, for instance, can become a missile moving 40 miles-per-hour if near an active 1.5-Tesla magnet.

Jensen Beach, Fla.-based Kopp said its distributor, Magmedix Inc., got the award for its FerrAlert system at the end of May, when the Navy Medical Logistics Command was organizing the project.
For the project, the Navy commissioned a couple of mobile 1.5-T Achieva MRI units, made by Philips Healthcare, to be the first MRI systems ever sent to a combat theater. Working with two NATO-run hospitals in the Central Asian country, the scanners will be used for a variety of medical procedures, but primarily are aimed at diagnosing traumatic brain injury, often dubbed the "signature" injury in America's 21st century wars.

Before this purchase, the closest MRI for U.S. service members was thousands of miles away in a military hospital in Germany.

The detectors

Inside the trailer, the detector is installed on the door frame of the magnet room. Ana Srb, director of marketing and sales with Kopp, said the company's European workers went to the Netherlands, where Philips is headquartered, to install the detectors on the units before shipment to Afghanistan.

This isn't the company's first government order. The Veterans Affairs health system has been one of Kopp's biggest customers, Srb said. "I would say around 40 VA hospitals have our units, and we probably have 60-70 units altogether around the VA," she said.

Kopp was founded in 2004, shortly after the death of Michal Colombini, a boy who was killed by a "projectilized" object while undergoing an MRI scan in New York in 2001.

The issue of MRI safety is something the Food and Drug Administration plans on tackling in a workshop later this year . A 2008 fact sheet by the Veterans Affairs patient safety center noted that there have been reports of a wheelchair, oxygen cylinder, IV pole, stretcher and walker all becoming projectiles in VA facilities. The VA said the average cost of an incident was over $43,000.

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