Marshall R. Shannon has spent more than twenty-five years inside one of medicine's most demanding and least-understood disciplines: keeping MRI and CT systems running, safe, and accurate.
As Director of Operations at Image Technology Consulting LLC in Lancaster, Texas, he leads an independent, third-party service operation supporting equipment from Philips, Siemens, Hitachi, and other major manufacturers. The work spans the entire life of a machine — installing and ramping new systems, shimming magnets to exacting tolerances, refurbishing mobile MRI units, and answering the emergency calls that come when a scanner goes down and patients are waiting.
Over the years that has meant work in clinics and hospitals across the United States and internationally, often under pressure and on impossible timelines. He has built particular depth in cryogenic systems — the supercooled heart of every MRI magnet — and in the kind of escalated, no-room-for-error field service that most people never see and never think about, right up until the moment they're lying inside the machine.
That vantage point — close to the technology, closer to the patients, and inside the commercial machinery that surrounds both — is what led Marshall to write Through Fire: The Story of an MRI Engineer.
The book is an unfiltered account of the world he knows: the engineering, the high-stakes service calls, and the uncomfortable tension between corporate priorities and patient safety. It's written for engineers and healthcare professionals who will recognize the terrain, and for general readers who have never considered what it actually takes to make a medical image they can trust.
Marshall writes from experience rather than theory — the perspective of someone who has been on the floor at 3 a.m. with a failed system, weighing what's right against what's expedient, and choosing to tell the truth about it.
You can learn more about the book, read excerpts, and get in touch through the rest of the site.
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