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General discussion

Can Software Kill?

Mar 12, 2004 11:47PM PST
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1544619,00.asp

<i>As software spreads from computers to the engines of automobiles to robots in factories to X-ray machines in hospitals, defects are no longer a problem to be managed. They have to be predicted and excised. Otherwise, unanticipated uses will lead to unintended consequences. For proof, look no further than the cancer patients in Panama who died after being overdosed by a Cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine. Or ask the technicians who plugged data into the software that guided that machine, and are now charged with second-degree murder. </i>

I remember hearing about the full-body scanner that was burning people because of a software error. When the technitian made and error and reset the machine to start over, it would add the radiation rather than starting over.

Discussion is locked

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I say No !
Mar 13, 2004 12:17AM PST

It's like guns. Guns don't kill - people kill.

Software doesn't kill - incompetent or imperfect people kill.

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Re:I say No !
Mar 13, 2004 12:29AM PST

Ah, but Del. have you never made a mistake.?

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Buggy software is exactly why...
Mar 13, 2004 1:40AM PST

they don't use Windows for air traffic control. It's also the reason it's not used on the space shuttle or the International Space Station.

In general though it is not the software itself that kills but the irresponsible, total reliance on software to perform flawlessly in life critical situations. In the case cited in the article you posted where panamanian patients were overdosed by the machine it was the policy governing the use of that machine that was flawed. That policy should have required the technicians using the machine to chack and verify the machine's accuracy where the potential existed for the patients to be killed. It was the writer of the policy that failed or the technicians failure to follow that policy that caused those deaths, not the fault of the software. Software should NEVER be expected to perform flawlessly.

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Full body scan story, Diana...
Mar 13, 2004 4:07AM PST

Diana, I have my doubts about that full body scan story. I've been thru several of the proceedures explained in the below link, and they produce coin-like slices of the body, which are displayed one-by one on a monitor. The entire "stack of coin-images" are saved for study, but a technician is sitting in the control room watching them build. If the radiation level were to high, he'd see blank (overexposed) slices start to build and would stop and correct the level. Considering that I'm 6'1 and under 100 lbs when I was in the hospital, sometimes I gave them "fits" adjusting for me.
Note on the below information link: A full body scan uses CT technology,
Link: http://www.theuniversityhospital.com/healthlink/july2003/radio.html

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Re:Full body scan story, Diana...
Mar 13, 2004 4:36AM PST

I don't remember the details. I just remember it on TV. It came out after I had a full body scan and that's why I remember it. It wasn't a CT scan, it was one of those big machines that does your whole body at once - reminds me of the top of a coffin.

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Could it have been, Diana...
Mar 13, 2004 4:57AM PST

Diana, did they make a big deal of making sure that you had do metalic objects on you or in you (implants, pacemaker, etc.)?
If so, it could have been an MRI, which uses very, very strong magnetic fields to make images. (no radiation hazzard)

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Don't know what it was
Mar 13, 2004 7:04AM PST

Wasn't the typical circular MRI. It was a long, flat thing (how's that for a technical word?) that covered my whole body and was lowered and turned on. This was in the early eighties and I didn't have a PC and definitely no internet so I couldn't look it up.

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It may have been a MRI or MRA, Diana.
Mar 13, 2004 5:14AM PST
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A bone scan perhaps?
Mar 13, 2004 9:12AM PST

For bone scans the procedure requires an injection of a small amount of radioactive material, and the image is obtained via a machine that is (sort of) a giant geiger counter. It does not look like a geiger counter, but that is another matter altogether.