Why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar?

Why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar? - Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine and Nurse

In Interstellar, Cooper mentions that they don't have any MRI machines while talking to his kid's teacher. The dialogue goes as follows:

One of those useless machines they used to make was called an MRI. If we had any of them left the doctors might have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain before she died, rather than afterwards. And then my kids could have been raised by two parents, instead of me and their pain-in-the-a#$ grandfather.

So, they had MRI machines in the past, but not any longer.

Why are there no MRI machines available? These are not like an Apollo mission which they have to declare fake. What happened to them? Is it ever explained in the movie or by Nolans or someone from the production team?



Best Answer

According to Interstellar's screenwriter Jonathan Nolan:

Revelation 2: The death of tech in the film, like GPS and MRI machines, is based on informational extinctions in history.

Jonah Nolan: Kip and I spent a memorable afternoon with some fantastic scientists that Kip pulled together to talk through all the different ways human life could be extinguished or hobbled on our planet. It was a very depressing afternoon. [Laughs] I remember being struck by the fragility of life here. Everyone who has grown up in the West and has been fortunate enough to live through a rather peaceful period, every year everything seems a little better. It's hard for us to imagine periods when things go backwards, but they do very, very frequently. Just in the last 2,000 years, we can identify at last half a dozen periods in western culture where technologies were lost that ancient civilizations had that we still don't fully understand exactly, so you know that there's been knowledge lost since as early as the Middle Ages. What we know about that period survives because of beautifully transcribed manuscripts out on some rocky island on the North Sea. Although it's not our experience, it's frighteningly easy to imagine technology backsliding.

So it is basically an unexplained item that is in part thrown in there to indicate the downward spiral of the world.

This review explains this concept:

A script by Nolan and his brother Jonathan sets the stage, creating a near future world where crops are failing—wheat is gone, okra is on the chopping block, and all farmers can grow with any reliability is corn—and the planet is becoming a giant dustbowl.

They accomplish this visually with looming sand storms, as well as through small hints, mentioning food riots, hinting at hard times in the recent past, and painting a society that needs farmers more than engineers. In all of this there are a handful of nice touches, like how the New York Yankees are basically a high school baseball team, and though you’re never sure what happened, you get enough to know that the world has changed. Better now than it was, there’s no military, and things are relatively peaceful, but they blame for the disastrous near collapse of civilization on rampant technology, like MRI machines that could have saved Coop’s wife, or wasteful spending on things like space exploration—it’s now taught in schools that the moon landing was fake.




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Why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar? - View of Operating Room
Why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar? - Close-Up Shot of MRI Results
Why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar? - MRI Images of the Brain



What will replace MRIs?

A CT scan may be recommended if a patient can't have an MRI. People with metal implants, pacemakers or other implanted devices shouldn't have an MRI due to the powerful magnet inside the machine. CT scans create images of bones and soft tissues.

How many 7t MRIs are there in the world?

The number of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners operating at 7 T world-wide now exceeds 70 (Huber, 2018). Neuroimaging researchers' access to 7 T scanners is therefore increasingly common.

How many Tesla is the worlds most powerful MRI?

\u200bSeptember 2021, the 11.7 Tesla MRI of the Iseult project, the most powerful in the world for human imaging, has just unveiled its first images.

Does Tesla make MRI machines?

Because the 3 Tesla MRI scanner is so reliable, physicians, radiology experts, and the rest of your health care team are able to provide you with a quicker diagnosis and more accurate treatment, which improves your chances of seeing a positive outcome.




More answers regarding why are there not any MRI machines available in Interstellar?

Answer 2

The cause is that all of humanity is concerned on making food to survive, so most of people are farmers, there is a shortage of engineers who could make and operate such machines, as well as the fact that it is very expensive to use MRI.

There is no need for MRI machines when most of the people are dying from starvation, not diseases which need MRI scans.

Answer 3

Since good canonical answers have already been posted, here's my take:

MRI machines need liquid helium to super-cool their electromagnets into superconductors. Helium is a non-renewable natural resource and, in fact, we are already in short supply of it.

Presumably we ran out of helium, and without a suitable replacement, we scrapped the now useless MRI machines to make room for more hospital beds. By the time we could manufacture a suitable superconductor that could run on liquid nitrogen, nobody knew how to build or operate a MRI machine any more.

(Note that it's rather unlikely this would actually happen, as we already have prototype liquid-nitrogen-free MRI coils)

Answer 4

Short Answer: They ran out of Isotopes

Long Answer: The way an MRI works is that compounds labeled with stable isotopes are used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging to render visible metabolic changes in the body.

The Isotopes are a scarce resource; it's already being discussed that the global medical community could run out of the Isotopes needed in this process in our near future.

Because 99Mo has a half-life of 66 hours, the isotope can’t be stockpiled and must be delivered within a few days to the hospital or pharmacy. The daughter 99mTc, which has a half-life of six hours, is tapped at the location of use.

The US hasn’t produced 99Mo since the 1980s. But 99mTc is used in about 50 000 medical procedures each day in the US, according to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Sources: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.1091/abs/

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