A man wearing a metallic necklace was critically injured Wednesday in Westbury when an MRI scanner drew him inside the machine after he entered the testing room during a scan, according to Nassau County police.

The 61-year-old, who wasn't authorized to be in the room, is hospitalized in critical condition, the department wrote in a news release. His name wasn’t disclosed. The machine was being operated at Nassau Open MRI, inside a medical building at 1570 Old Country Rd. 

The incident happened at about 4:34 p.m. The police homicide squad is investigating what happened.

"The male victim was wearing a large metallic chain around his neck causing him to be drawn into the machine which resulted in a medical episode," the release said. Further details were not disclosed.

Spencer Scott, a worker at the center, said by phone he didn’t know the man’s connection, if any, to the clinic, but said he wasn’t a patient. Scott said there might be video of the incident.

"I’ve never heard this happening in my life," he said.

MRI, which stands for magnetic resonance imaging, generates detailed images of the inside of the body by using strong magnets and radio waves.

To help patients who are claustrophobic or have other characteristics that make a traditional MRI difficult, open MRI machines are open at the sides instead of being a tube that's enclosed at one end so the patient is surrounded.

Injuries and deaths tied to MRI machines are rare but can occur when the magnets pull an object from inside the room — or from a test subject’s person — at high speeds and create a projectile that can strike anyone present, experts say. That is why a test subject is instructed to remove all metallic and electronic objects before a scan, and access to the room is limited.

A 10-year review published in 2019 in the journal Medical Physics tallied about 141 "projectile events" involving MRI injuries that were reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"Magnetic resonance imaging incidents are severely underreported," according to a 2021 study in the journal European Radiology.

Newsday's Lauren Zola contributed to this story.