Abstract <p>Ongoing armed conflicts necessitate the creation of new modifications of eddy current metal detectors to facilitate and accelerate surgical operations to extract damaging elements from patient bodies. Currently used specialized metal detectors have been developed in relation to the extraction of metal foreign bodies that are in the patient’s body for domestic or industrial reasons. These are pellets, sewing and injection needles (or their fragments), fragments of a tool, etc. The shape, size and electromagnetic properties of the damaging elements differ significantly from the corresponding properties of such foreign bodies. The proposed article discusses the features of the properties of damaging elements that must be taken into account when developing metal detectors that are currently oriented towards medical use. Results of numerical modeling of electromagnetic properties of damaging elements, which are of interest for substantiated selection of technical characteristics of specialized metal detectors, are given. It has been shown that it is useful to increase the operating frequencies of these detectors to at least hundreds kilohertz and to use both phase components of the useful signal, summing their amplitudes by the absolute value.</p>