The Magnetron Symphony

From our Marketing Appreciation department.

Magnetron Symphony sounds SiFi, with your choice of author, Philip K. Dick for dark and unsettling, Futurama for fun like Frey's symphony with the Devil.

The Magnetron Symphony is a machine, an MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) machine for body scans. It is such an important diagnostic device that the inventors received a Nobel Prize.

We can easily imagine Siemens PR and marketing managers sequestered in a Munich, Germany, conference room or in their R&D department, scratching heads to come up with a non-threatening, comfortable, medically adequate name for the huge donut shaped machine. The reality of the sound created by an MRI machine is much better described by another term ending in "phony", cacophony. Loud, disjointed, outright deafening. The mickey mouse headphones handed to patients are not a luxury. They attenuate the noise and they deliver music to shorten the time and fight claustrophobia as the slider feeds the patient to the donut.

Seeing a patient laying perfectly still on the other side of the thick, shielded glass window while the technician rotates, slices and dices the image of the person's head on the computer screen is eerie for a minute or two. After that, curiosity takes over.

Several more minutes into the half hour session, being a little spoiled from fancy television shows like CSI and Bones, you may find yourself wanting a color image instead of the black and white image slices of the human.

What ever the diagnostic outcome for the patient, the folks who named the machine Magnetron Symphony deserve a thank you.