Can You Have an MRI With Stitches or Staples?

Most stitches and surgical staples are safe inside an MRI scanner. The vast majority of suture materials used today are non-metallic, and even standard stainless-steel skin staples have been studied directly and found to produce no measurable movement or dangerous heating during scanning. That said, the material matters, the type of closure matters, and you should always disclose any recent surgery to the MRI team before you go in. The details below explain why the answer is almost always “yes” and when it occasionally gets more complicated.

Why Metal and MRI Scanners Do Not Always Mix

An MRI machine generates an enormously powerful magnetic field, typically 1.5 or 3 Tesla, which is thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s own magnetic field. It also pulses radiofrequency energy into your body to generate images. Any metal inside or on your body interacts with those forces in three potential ways: the magnet can tug on the metal (sometimes called the “missile effect” at an extreme), the radiofrequency pulses can heat the metal, and the metal can distort the image. For large ferromagnetic objects like certain older aneurysm clips, these risks are genuine and serious. For tiny wound closures sitting on or near the skin surface, the physics plays out very differently.

Surgical Staples in the Scanner

Standard skin closure staples are small, made of stainless steel or titanium, and sit right at the body’s surface. Researchers have tested them directly. In one experiment using pig feet with surgical staples in place, the surface temperature actually dropped slightly during a full MRI scan rather than rising, and no staple showed any measurable change in position or any movement visible to inspection.¹ The worry that staples would heat up or shift under the magnet simply did not materialize.

Separate testing at 3 Tesla, the stronger of the two common clinical field strengths, found that skin closure staples showed only minor magnetic field interactions with deflection angles around 20 to 27 degrees, which falls within the range considered safe.² For context, deflection of 45 degrees or less is generally the threshold that safety guidelines treat as acceptable. A staple deflecting 20 degrees in a powerful magnetic field is barely budging, especially given its tiny mass. You would not feel it.

A broader assessment of clips, fasteners, and staples at 3 Tesla did find a wider range of deflection angles, from 0 up to 90 degrees for certain types.³ That upper end sounds alarming, but it reflects specific products and designs, not all staples as a category. The MRI safety community maintains databases that classify individual devices, and most common skin staples land well within the safe zone. The critical point is that “staples” is not one thing; the brand, the alloy, and the size all matter.

Stitches and Suture Materials

If your wound was closed with stitches rather than staples, the picture is even simpler. The vast majority of modern suture materials are synthetic polymers like nylon, polyester, polypropylene, or absorbable materials such as polyglactin. These contain zero metal and produce essentially no interaction with the MRI’s magnetic field. You can walk into the scanner with nylon stitches and the machine will not even “know” they are there.

Metallic suture wire does still exist. Stainless-steel sutures are occasionally used in specific surgical settings, such as sternotomy closure after open-heart surgery (sternal wires) or in certain orthopedic repairs. Even these metallic sutures have been tested. Deflection measurements for suture materials at 3 Tesla ranged from 0 to 13 degrees with very low torque.³ That is a trivial amount of deflection, well within safety limits. One ophthalmic study went further, placing steel wire sutures (the very fine 5-0 and 6-0 gauges used in eye surgery) in the powerful magnetic field and found no magnetic movement or change of position at all.⁴

The American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association have stated that metallic implants such as sternal sutures are compatible with MRI because they are not strongly ferromagnetic.⁵ If even sternal wires buried in your chest get the green light, standard skin stitches are a non-issue from a safety standpoint.

The Heating Question

Radiofrequency energy in an MRI scanner can heat metal, and this is a legitimate concern with larger implants like joint replacements or long orthopedic rods. For small wound closures, the story is different. The pig-foot experiment described earlier found that surface temperature near surgical staples did not rise during scanning. The mean temperature actually went down by about half a degree Celsius, likely because of airflow in the scanner bore rather than any cooling effect of the staples themselves.¹

That does not mean metal never heats in an MRI. Research on metallic cerclage wires, the loops of wire used to bind fractured bone together after certain surgeries, has confirmed that tissue heating does occur around metallic implants through multiple pathways: the wire itself heats from induced electrical currents, the metal distorts the scanner’s radiofrequency field in ways that concentrate energy locally, and the metal alters the pattern of eddy currents flowing through body tissue.⁶ But even that research described the resulting temperature rise as moderate. The key variable is geometry: a long wire loop acts as a better antenna for radiofrequency energy than a tiny staple or a short suture. The shorter and smaller the metal, the less energy it absorbs, and skin closure staples are about as short and small as surgical metal gets.

Image Artifacts Are the Bigger Practical Concern

Safety is usually the first question patients ask, but the more common real-world headache with stitches and staples in an MRI is image quality. Metal creates artifacts, dark voids or bright distortions that obscure the tissue immediately around the implant. Classic research in radiology has shown that the severity of these artifacts depends on the composition of the metal, its mass, its orientation relative to the magnetic field, and its position in the body.⁷ In most cases, the artifact from a metallic implant did not prevent the radiologist from interpreting the overall image.

Skin staples and metallic suture material are specifically named among the sources of susceptibility artifacts in MRI.⁸ The artifact typically shows up as a small dark spot or a starburst of signal loss right at the staple’s location. If the MRI is scanning a knee and the staples are on your scalp, this is irrelevant. If the MRI is targeting the exact area where the staples sit, the artifact could obscure the tissue your doctor needs to see.

This is one practical reason why your care team might prefer to remove skin staples before an MRI if the scan targets the same region. The removal is not because the staples are dangerous inside the scanner; it is because leaving them in place could degrade the images enough to make the scan less useful. Non-metallic stitches, by contrast, produce virtually no artifact at all, which is one more reason they are increasingly the default wound closure in most surgical settings.

When Material Composition Gets Tricky

The reason MRI screening forms ask about every piece of metal in your body is that not all metals behave the same way. Titanium and many grades of stainless steel are weakly magnetic or non-magnetic and sail through an MRI without drama. Certain older or specialty alloys can be more strongly ferromagnetic. A staple made from a strongly magnetic alloy could experience noticeably more pull and potentially more heating than the standard products tested in published research.

In practice, you may not know exactly what alloy your surgical staples are made from. Your surgeon’s operative report typically records the brand and type, and the MRI team can cross-reference that information against a device-safety database. If you are scheduling an MRI weeks or months after surgery, it is worth asking your surgeon’s office for this detail ahead of time. For standard commercially available skin staples sold in the United States and Europe, the alloys used are well characterized and overwhelmingly classified as MRI-safe or MRI-conditional (meaning safe under specified conditions, such as a maximum field strength).

Internal Clips and Staples After Abdominal or Thoracic Surgery

A question that frequently trips people up is the distinction between skin closure staples, which sit on the surface and are removed in a week or two, and internal surgical clips or staples that stay permanently in the body. If you have had gallbladder removal, bariatric surgery, or many other abdominal procedures, you likely have small titanium or non-ferromagnetic clips inside you. These are designed with MRI compatibility in mind. The cardiology guidelines that clear sternal sutures for MRI also address mechanical heart valves, coronary stents, and similar internal hardware, classifying them as MRI-compatible because they are not ferromagnetic.⁵

The exception that truly matters involves certain older-generation aneurysm clips used in brain surgery. Some of these were made from strongly ferromagnetic alloys, and exposing them to a powerful magnetic field can be genuinely dangerous. These are a very specific, well-known contraindication. If you have an intracranial aneurysm clip and do not have documentation of its exact type and MRI compatibility, your radiology team will not proceed. This situation is categorically different from having skin staples or standard internal surgical clips.

What You Should Tell the MRI Team

Even though the evidence is reassuring for most stitches and staples, the screening process exists for a reason, and full disclosure is non-negotiable. Before every MRI, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about metal in your body. Here is what helps the team make a fast, safe decision:

• Type of surgery: knowing the procedure helps the team anticipate what hardware might be present, even if you do not remember the details.
• Date of surgery: if skin staples were placed recently, the team may want to check whether removal is feasible and whether scanning over fresh wounds is appropriate.
• Brand or type of closure: if you know the specific staple or suture brand, the team can look it up in real time. If you do not know, the operative note from your surgeon usually has this information.
• Location of the closures: the team needs to know whether the metal is in or near the area being scanned, because artifact could affect image quality even when safety is not a concern.

If any uncertainty remains and the scan is not urgent, the simplest solution is to wait until skin staples are removed, which typically happens within 7 to 14 days of surgery depending on the site. Dissolving stitches, of course, gradually disappear on their own and present zero MRI issues at any point.

Feeling a Tug or Warmth During the Scan

Some patients with metal in their body report feeling a slight tugging sensation or mild warmth at the site during an MRI. For skin staples, the tugging would come from the static magnetic field pulling on the weakly magnetic stainless steel, and the warmth from radiofrequency-induced heating. Published data suggest these effects are either absent or below the level of perception for small skin closures, given the negligible deflection and lack of temperature rise observed in controlled tests.² If you do feel anything unusual during a scan, every MRI suite provides a squeeze bulb or alert button to stop the exam immediately. The responsible approach is to mention any sensation to the technologist rather than toughing it out, because the team needs to know if something unexpected is happening.

Eye Surgery, Dental Work, and Other Special Cases

Specific body sites raise their own questions. For eye surgery, even metallic wire sutures as fine as the gauges used in ophthalmic procedures have been tested and showed no movement in the magnetic field and produced no image artifacts at 0.5 Tesla.⁴ Dental work is a separate and common worry. Most modern dental implants, crowns, and orthodontic brackets are made from titanium, porcelain, or other MRI-compatible materials, though they can create significant artifacts in head and neck imaging. Old-style dental fillings that contained metals like amalgam are generally MRI-safe in terms of movement and heating, but they can distort images of the jaw and sinuses.

Piercing jewelry is worth mentioning here because patients sometimes forget about it. Body jewelry is typically not surgical-grade material and should always be removed before entering the scanner room. Unlike surgical staples, which are tested and classified, a random belly-button ring or earring could be made from anything, and even non-ferromagnetic jewelry can heat up or cause burns if it forms a conductive loop on the skin’s surface.

Why Staple Removal Before MRI Is Sometimes Requested Anyway

If the evidence shows staples are safe in the scanner, why do some hospitals still ask patients to have them removed before an MRI? A few reasons converge. First, artifact: as described above, metal staples near the scan region degrade image quality. Removing them costs very little and eliminates the artifact entirely. Second, medicolegal caution. Hospitals and radiology departments follow conservative protocols because the consequences of a rare adverse event in a powerful magnetic field are severe. If removal is easy and the wound is healed enough to tolerate it, there is little reason not to play it safe. Third, not every staple on the market has been individually tested and classified. A facility that cannot confirm the specific product’s MRI compatibility may default to removal rather than assume.

None of this means you should panic if you are headed to an MRI and still have staples in place. It means you should contact the MRI facility in advance, provide whatever information you can about your surgery, and let them guide the decision. In many cases, the scan proceeds uneventfully with the staples right where they are.