#308 2005 · GE Healthcare × Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh · Medical imagingredesign-the-moment
GE turned its MRI scanner into a pirate ship, and Pittsburgh's children stopped needing sedation to hold still
the problem
Nearly every child under nine had to be sedated to survive the MRI's noise and confinement
background
GE industrial designer Doug Dietz had spent his career treating MRI scanners as pure engineering problems — magnet strength, image resolution, scan time. Visiting a hospital to watch his machine in use, he saw a father trying to console a sobbing six-year-old too frightened by the tube, the noise and the confinement to hold still without general anesthesia. Dietz later said he realized the machine he'd built to help children was traumatizing them, and nothing in his training as an engineer had taught him to see it coming.
He spent a week at Stanford's d.school learning empathy-driven design, then visited daycare centers to watch how children actually play. The redesign never touched the scanner's engineering — it rebuilt the room around it as a themed adventure (a pirate ship, a coral reef, a spaceship), with technologists trained to run a script that cast the child as the hero of a mission requiring them to hold still, piloted at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Sources disagree on the exact founding year — trade coverage frames 2005 as the pilot's first full year of data, other retrospectives describe the pilot's origin as 2006, and the hospital kept expanding the concept through a 2008–2009 redesign — so the record here is treated as imprecise rather than pinned to a single date with false confidence.
the move
After watching a family come apart in front of his own machine, GE industrial designer Doug Dietz spent a week at Stanford's d.school, then rebuilt the scan room itself — pirate ship, coral reef, spaceship — with a script that cast the child as the hero who must hold still to complete the mission, piloted at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.
the payoff
Radiology Today reported pediatric sedation cases at the hospital fell from 351 in 2005 to nine in 2007 (a 97% drop) as exam volume rose 18%; a later industry retrospective (All.Can) separately cites sedation falling from roughly 80% of children to under 27%, and patient satisfaction rising about 90% — different measures (case counts vs. share of children sedated) that both point the same direction rather than one clean number.
what came after
GE turned the redesign into a sellable product line, the Adventure Series, since installed in children's hospitals worldwide — the empathy exercise became a catalog item, and themed pediatric-imaging suites are now closer to standard practice than a hidden insight.
references
- [1]All.Can — GE Healthcare Adventure Series: making imaging more child-friendlyAll.Can International, 2023all-can.org
- [2]This is Design Thinking! — Changing Experiences through Empathy: The Adventure SeriesThis is Design Thinking!, 2014thisisdesignthinking.net
- [3]Radiology Today — Pittsburgh's Other PiratesRadiology Today, 2011radiologytoday.net