Lego MRI Scanners donated to hospitals to help children cope with anxiety (2022)
lego.com
lego.com
Edit: found some pictures online https://www.cores.emory.edu/csic/resources/imaging/mri_for_h...
Also, will they be able to comprehend that the things they are seeing in the AI image is an analogue of what will happen soon? It won't replace the "tactileness" of the machine and process, adults or companions can't guide them through a hologram in any immediate way.
I remembers from my class that there are some published works that design MRI sequences ("pattern" in which you operate the MRI machine to switch/modulate the electromagnets of the gradient coils, send RF pulses, and record the received RF pulses) in such a way that they reduce or don't cause the majority of the noise from the switching of the gradient coil in a typical MRI sequence.
There are and they have various names from vendors (whisper mode, quiet suite etc). Unfortunately these modes of operation are usually a bit limiting in terms of resolution and make sequences longer. They do reduce the noise.
By and large, if you give kids a movie to watch you’ll get 30 minutes of them remaining still.
Clinically, the application for noise reduction is often for patients whose hearing is at risk and can’t be protected effectively. Animals and patients with pathology which prevents earplug or headphone use etc.
https://www.siemens-healthineers.com/en-us/magnetic-resonanc...
I think a refracted VR display made of ulexite-like glasses might have a place.
In contrast, MRIs are like the ultimate trance build-up.
> The LEGO Foundation has announced it will donate 600 LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals worldwide
Seriously LEGO, 600 for a worldwide campaign, your marketing campaign didn't have more budget than this? This would barely be enough to make a meaningful difference for Copenhagen alone!
Using sick children to do brand marketing is always walking on a tight rope, but if you're actually helping them why not. But by giving only 600 LEGO sets, it's even below the smallest Rotary fundraiser you can find in rural places, this is beyond ridiculous.
So you're looking at an outlay of about $30,000. Which isn't a lot for the most popular toy brand on the face of the Earth. Lego could probably afford to provide a Lego MRI for every MRI machine on the face of the Earth and not break the bank.
HOWEVER. This does look to be an employee-driven initiative. And I don't mean it's something chaired by an employee, I mean a dude in Billund just did this. Then brought it to management for expansion. And it's only a single part of Lego's Learning Through Play - (https://learningthroughplay.com/) program, so it's possible this is like the extent of this project's budget.
The sets are assembled by volunteer Lego employees with bricks provided by Lego.
The surface layer is that Lego is providing sets to hospitals. Which is nice.
The second layer is that they're just giving them out to 300 hospitals. Which seems stingy considering Lego's revenue.
The next layer is that it is an employee driven collaboration with other entities to conduct a study to see how to best construct and use these sets to put kids at ease. Which is more complex.
When you use such a title “The LEGO Foundation to donate LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals globally” for an employee-driven initiative that merely involves 600 LEGO sets, your marketing is a shame.
That means donating 600 sets will cost them the profit of selling:
(600 sets * $1,000) / (10% profit * $46.31 per normal LEGO set sold) = 129,562 LEGO sets.
Assuming 220,000,000 sets sold per year (https://www.google.com/search?q=lego+set+sold+per+year, this number comes back a few times) this means LEGO donated:
(129,562 / 220,000,000) * 1 year = 0.0006 years ≈ 5 hours and 20 minutes of profits.
If I calculate my income over a 5 hours and 20 minutes period (based on dividing my monthly salary by working 36 hours per week), it would be equivalent to me donating €160 to a good cause. Not something I'd publish a proud blog post about.
This makes no sense unless you think they are making pieces that are only for this set which is almost certainly not the case considering others have posted rebrickable links for essentially the exact set[1]
Of course I have zero insight into LEGO's operational processes and logistics. Which is why I took numbers that would make LEGO look more generous than they probably are: low profit margin, high cost per MRI set.
See section titled "Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site" at the following URL: https://www.lego.com/en-us/legal/notices-and-policies/fair-p...
Still, people refuse to say 'gif' correctly either, so you just can't win sometimes.
https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-103049/ayayop/mri-scanner/#...
https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-120823/mampepin/mri/#detail...
I also found the sets of blocks on Ali Express as well.
Would love to buy a LEGO set to have my own NMR machine at home. I couldn't find online, maybe they will release someday?
It would be nice to extend the room with the actual racks of electronics and power amplifiers, they only added the operator computers.
Having the model has really helped with their anxiety and means we've been able to play with it together and talk about the process and noises, and make it a bit more normal.
So they gave me a vest to wear like a baseball umpire and the scanner looked like a StarGate - they got out of the room then the machine spun up - part of the bed was then pulled in and it was all over in 30 seconds.
But let's assume you've got a million dollar top of the line model, the expected lifespan is 10 years, and you're using it 20 hours / day, then you need to account ~$100 per hour of usage. That's not a crazy amount in the medical world. Personnel costs of those operating / using it are going to outweigh the cost of the machine itself.
Costs vary hugely depending on machine spec and how it’s run. A gold plated set of contracts with specified uptime is not cheap, but it is easily a saving when you can’t bill thousands an hour due to an outage.
Spreading the cost over 10 years is a little misleading. Scanners can last 15 years without too much drama, but upgrades every 5 or so years which cost hundreds of thousands can be expected.
An outpatient scanner will not get 20 hours usage per day where I live, but a hospital one could.
Staff costs, as you note, are huge and dwarf the scanner costs over its lifetime. I wouldn’t be surprised if staffing was a 10x multiplier on scanner costs.
It turns out that ‘just deal with it’ is a pretty cruel attitude when a child needs help.
I’m not convinced that a Lego set will help get an MR done, but if these sets do help a few kids, that’s a pretty good thing. You never know what’ll help.
MRIs are fairly daunting machines. Even working in healthcare and as a firefighter, and having received multiple CT scans, my first MRI was a little intense. Mostly you're not necessarily in the best mindset to begin with...
... however, I do somewhat agree with you.
Looking around Discord last week, I saw a bunch of servers with earnest "warnings" to people about the national alert test.
"This is going to make a loud noise, and that may be frightening or scary to you, so we'd advise everyone to turn their phones and TVs off for the duration of the test to protect yourselves."
and verbiage to that effect (suffice to say that wasn't an exaggeration). Things like that are teaching people to jump at shadows, and more concerningly, there is a steadily growing subset of people who revel, indeed sometimes take pride in this at self-identifying like this, lumping it under a vastly wider umbrella definition of 'neurodivergent' than was ever intended by that moniker.
The procedure for getting a patient in and out of the machine always seems to take much longer than the actual scan. It might seem a bit dystopian, but a line of unconscious patients already secured on gurneys could probably be moved much more quickly than people climbing in and out, minimizing the downtime between patients.
> MRI staff lack the medical expertise to supervise drugged people
They don't, in fact they are often trained to administer drugs and other things (like contrast agents)
> unconscious patients already secured on gurneys
That's a level that might require an anesthesiologist.
Some places offer mirrored glasses at a 45-degree angle, allowing the patient to see outside of the machine. This often reduces anxiety.
Not in the clinics I've seen. Maybe in full hospitals, but in my area the majority of MRIs are at small clinics where the staff are adamant that they cannot handle any drugs beyond contrast agents.
Monitoring a patient when you are next to them is one thing, but it’s quite another to monitor a patient in another room with equipment that can’t contain wires and is running cables at 10ish metres long.
Sedation adds about 50% more time to a scan and anaesthetics doubles or quadruples scanner time while also adding the cost of anaesthetics, prep and recovery, which is huge.
Doing scans without sedation is preferable.
On a well run MR, patient change over is 1-2 minutes. Coil setup takes longer and varies between scans but for 20 minutes of imaging I’d expect bookings to be 30 minutes. The 20 minutes doesn’t include pauses between scans, SAR cool down and sequence prep time (which are all hard limits and staff can’t really improve them).