I seems like an easy mistake to make. The imaging was done, per the article "His wife told local media she had called him into the MRI room after her scan" and

I seems like an easy mistake to make. The imaging was done, per the article "His wife told local media she had called him into the MRI room after her scan" and so the technician could have looked at it being gold colored and didn't apply critical thinking to presume it wasn't real. There was no concern about screwing up the image.