#140 2005 · GE Healthcare × Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh · Medical imaging
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.
what everyone would do
As a career engineer, Dietz's natural response would have been to keep treating the MRI scanner as a pure engineering problem, working to make the machine itself quieter, faster, or less physically confining, since noise, duration and enclosure were the concrete, measurable variables an engineer trained to optimize a machine would reach for first.
what they saw
Watching a sobbing child too frightened to hold still without general anesthesia, Dietz realized the actual cost driver wasn't the machine's engineering specs, it was the child's own interpretation of what was happening to them, fear turning a stationary scan into something requiring expensive sedation. Rather than continuing to optimize magnet strength or scan time, variables his training had taught him to see, he rebuilt the experience around the unchanged machine as a themed adventure story that recast the child from a frightened patient into the hero of a mission, making the exact behavior needed, holding still, the child's own chosen goal rather than a demand imposed on them.
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.
why it works
Rebuilding the scan room as a pirate ship, coral reef or spaceship, with technologists trained to narrate a mission script, changed nothing about the MRI's actual engineering, but it changed what holding still meant to the child, from an frightening imposition to a heroic task inside a story they wanted to complete. Because the fear itself, not the machine's physical properties, was what made most scans require costly sedation, redesigning the cheapest variable in the system, the child's interpretation of the experience, produced outsized results without touching the far more expensive, harder-to-change scanner hardware: pediatric sedation cases at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh fell from 351 in 2005 to nine in 2007 while exam volume rose 18 percent. Because the fix lived entirely in room design and staff scripting rather than the scanner itself, GE could package and sell it as the Adventure Series, deploying the same experience redesign to any hospital with an existing MRI machine already installed.
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.
where it breaks
The mechanism depends on fear or perception genuinely being the primary driver of the costly behavior, sedation in this case, rather than a separate physical or medical limitation the redesign wouldn't address — a child unable to hold still due to a physical condition unrelated to fear wouldn't be helped by a more engaging narrative, since the story only changes willingness, not physical capability. It also depends on staff being properly trained and consistent in running the narrative script, since a themed room without technologists actually guiding the child through the story as intended would just be decoration, losing the actual behavioral mechanism the design depended on. And the fix is bounded by what fear alone was costing: because the underlying engineering never changed, any future improvement to actual scan time, noise, or confinement still required separate engineering work, meaning the experience redesign solved the specific cost driven by perception without addressing whatever costs stemmed from the machine's genuine physical limitations.
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