MRI scanner death: Daughter reveals desperate struggle to save dad sucked into machine

The family of a man who died after being sucked into an MRI machine frantically tried to free him for almost an hour.

Keith McAllister, 61, died after being pulled in wearing a 9kg weight-training chain around his neck while his wife was undergoing a scan. He suffered fatal injuries in the freak accident while his wife Adrienne Jones-McAllister's knee was being examined at Nassau Open MRI in Long Island, New York last week.

She had called out to her husband for assistance before he was drawn into the machine due to the chain around his neck. The powerful magnetic force generated by the MRI scanner hauled Mr McAllister into the apparatus, resulting in what police described as a “medical episode.”

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He was left in a critical condition and rushed to hospital. Ms Jones-McAllister said her husband suffered a series of heart attacks after being freed from the machine and he was later pronounced dead. His daughter Samantha Bodden has now revealed new details about what led to her father's death.

In the GoFundMe page set up to support the family with burial costs, she wrote: "While my mother was laying on the table, the technician left the room to get her husband to help her off the table. He forgot to inform him to take the chain he was wearing from around his neck off when the magnet sucked him in.

"My mother and the tech tried for several minutes to release him before the police were called. He was attached to the machine for almost an hour before they could release the chain from the machine." She then clarified: "Several news stations are saying he wasn’t authorized to be in the room when in fact he was because the technician went and brought him into the room."

Paying tribute to her dad, she added: "Keith was a husband, a father, a stepfather, a grandfather, a brother, and an uncle. He was a friend to many. He was on a fixed income from social security and didn’t have much. So at this time, my mother is asking for help with expenses to help bury him."

Ms Jones-McAllister detailed how her husband entered the scanning room still wearing the heavy metal chain he regularly used for weight training. "I yelled out Keith's name, [shouting] Keith, come help me up," she said. "I saw the machine snatch him around and pull him into the machine," she said through tears. "He died, he lost, he went limp in my arms."

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a non-invasive medical imaging technique that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to produce detailed images of the body's internal structures. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering warns that the magnetic field generated by an MRI is strong enough to pull ferromagnetic objects with deadly force.

"Very powerful forces are exerted on objects made of iron, some steels, and other magnetic materials," it says, noting the field can be “strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room”. MRI-related accidents are rare but can prove fatal when they do occur and this is not the first such incident in New York. In 2001, six-year-old Michael Colombini was killed at the Westchester Medical Centre when an oxygen tank was pulled into an MRI chamber by the machine’s 10-ton electromagnet.