Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> (The company learned that lesson in 1967, after a single pin was discovered between the layers of a suit prototype, leading to the installation of an X-ray machine on the shop floor that would regularly scan the suits for errant fasteners.)

This is also a thing in consumer mass production now. An outerwear factory that our startup worked with had a needle scanner as the last step of the process, before shipping. There was basically a window that finished units had to pass through, to shipping, so that the needle scanner wouldn't accidentally be skipped.

View on HN

They should do this in the medical world too, where surgery tools are sometimes left inside the patient.

That’s an expensive solution for a simple problem. They currently just count all supplies in and all supplies out. It works.

If it's that simple, why don't they do it in the fashion industry?

Because there's no practical way to do it on the scale of an entire factory. It works for surgery because you only do a single surgery in a single room on a single person with a countable number of supplies.

Factories don't work that way.

Absolutely, this is more common than many think

Clothing doesn't get cancer. Also a lot of what can get left in a patient doesn't show up super well on x-rays, so more general solutions like counting in and out are preferable.

Metal has the marvelous quality of showing up well on X-ray, and clothing has the marvelous quality of never getting cancer from X-rays.

Pieces of cotton do not show up on X-ray, and humans do get cancer from too much ionizing radiation.

Of course miscounts happen sometimes, and sometimes both the initial and final counts are one short of the true number, but the vast majority of undetected retained items are sponges made of cotton. Not tools, not even tiny needles. That’s why there is a radiopaque strip embedded in the sponges intended for use during surgery.

It is not perfect, and cannot be.

Also the food industry, especially meat where you want to avoid bones in unexpected places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com