What happens when someone has the bright idea to build an underground rail network just 20 metres beneath the foundations of your city’s hospital precinct?

Surely modern day subterranean engineering could avoid disturbing too much of the world above — given that is usually the point of going underground?

But it has turned into a $180 million headache for the Metro Tunnel Project that has tunnelled beneath the Parkville medical precinct in Melbourne, home to several major hospitals, cancer facilities and research centres.

The Victorian Government had known about the potential issues since the network’s inception a decade ago as a result of well-known risks of electromagnetic interference generating “artefacts” which can mimic the appearance of pathology or render MRI images unreadable.