Max Eskin wrote:
> I've also never heard of any
> medical machines failing, though this would tend to be underpublicized.
Don't read Risks Digest, do you? :-)
That's OK. Usually I don't have time to either. But there is a very
famous case where the Therac-25, a machine to administer radiation therapy,
had a combination of software bugs and insufficient hardware safeguards
such that under certain circumstances it could provide a much higher dose
than intended - in fact, around 15x the dose that is typically fatal. This
resulted in the death of at least four patients, and serious injury to others.
The best technical coverage of this problem I've seen was published in
IEEE Computer, Volume 26, Number 7. It appears to be available online
at:
http://199.111.112.137/others/seminar/notes/therac_1.html
Received on Mon Apr 05 1999 - 21:29:07 BST