Anyone have any idea if this can be looked at by the end user? I'm not a radiation technologist of the flavour mentioned in the article, I'm on the diagnostic side. I use an MR scanner with numerous software bugs that I have reported but which remain. Similarly, the scanner can be made to display data which it says it is going to use in the next scan, but which it isn't. I suspected a bug and found the way to reproduce it. My last email listed 24 similar bugs (I've found more since) but other than a "thanks, we will forward this on" there has been no reply or comment. It is hard to imagine when this could be a safety issue, but it is a waste of valuable time, it is a waste of money and it's frustrating when I have gone to the trouble of working out the exact way of creating the issues. If anyone is interested, the interface is so god awful that instead of having an on off button or switch interface, the scanner gets the user to type 1 or 0 for on and off into a text field. Some fields take other values like 1, 2 and 3. Some take decimal values like 0 to 1 in 0.1 increments. There is no pattern to what the user is expected to type. Yuck. This data is not properly sanitized either, and you can make the scanner say its "doing" something it's not. Type in 1.999, and error message appears, the field corrects to 2.0 but the scanner does the thing that a setting of 1 would produce. These sorts of bugs occur all over the place.
Edit: The "thanks" email is the most positive I've ever got, my previous reports were me with statements like "we have some very experienced users who haven't had this issue" when there were clear safety problems with earlier scanner implementations (The scanner was producing axial slices at a location different to where I asked for them to be, on a spine patient due in theatre - good luck operating on the correct vertebral level). Its FDA approved and its on the latest software release. I have undergone manufacturer training and have had additional training half a dozen times at my request and at the manufacturers request after my bug reports were met with "you're doing it wrong". I'm not, the software is buggy and I have some excellent and amazing screen shots and camera phone video of the bugs in action.
This is known as the Corrective Action, Preventative Action (CAPA) process [0]. Note that the investigation into your complaint is an absolute requirement. Not just e-mails, but even phone conversations, or comments made in passing verbally - if any of them constitute a comment (positive or negative) on the device, this needs to be logged and, if the comment warrants it, an investigation must take place.
So either your comments have been or are in the process of being investigated, or the device manufacturer is not following the FDA rules.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_and_preventive_actio...
Don't send random emails to people in the company, most people can't be held accountable for mishandling bug-reports (or ignoring them).
Look up the contact to send non-conformance reports in the user-manual of the device, there has to be a contact address, maybe even a (paper) form to fill out. Send it by paper-mail to the address (most likely the QA department). Request a classification of the issue (urgent, user-error, critical, ...) and an ID under which this issue is tracked. Set a deadline for replies to your inquiries.
If you really want to be serious, the FDA takes reports on defective medical products, here's a webpage on this process:
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/HowToReport/DownloadForms...
Fixing bugs in a medical device is not slow because it'd take a long time to fix the bug itself. It's slow because there's a lot of paperwork (Device History Files, specifications, tons of reviews, etc.) and system testing that follows. That's why you'd only correct issues that do not endanger patient safety once there are enough or when they can be combined with new features in firmware.
There's also always a risk that those fixed issues cause patient endangering bugs.
It can take almost one year from implementing the fix until it is running on any significant number of medical (imaging) devices in question.
FDA's rules are there for a reason. Although... someone should tell FDA git exists. It's silly to revision things manually in Word documents.
I work on medical devices (and have worked on radiotherapy devices previously) and the standards for quality systems and regulatory hurdles (which I occasionally see bemoaned here on HN) are there with good reason. In fact, Therac-25 is often cited when training new hires on quality (as required with any ISO-13485 compliant QMS).
The research I did has always stuck with me because of the suffering the patients where exposed to combined with a company attitude of "admit only what we are forced to so we don't hurt sales".
Nothing I write is safety critical (though it was a field I was fascinated with when I was younger) though so I can sleep at night.
Knowing about, and thinking about, the ACM Code of Ethics, Stuxnet, Therac-25, the Windows Security Patch Policy, and other problems our programming culture have come across is important. Realizing that the code we write can affect people in both positive and negative ways on a long and short term scale is something that can change both your product and how you build a product.
"An error message asked [the medical physicist operating the device] if she wanted to save her changes before the program aborted. She answered yes."
How many programmers read that and cringe? I know I did. My guess is that the operating system being used for the device is some standard OS (Windows CE, maybe?) that is being repurposed to run the application and provide the GUI for the device. It's not that this is necessarily bad, but I would think the most important thing to do would be to strip the OS (or UI) of the various "user conveniences" that in a life or death situation could have all kinds of unintended consequences.
If a person is coding or doing graphic design -- or typing up cooking recipes -- and a crash happens, it's a good thing to have the opportunity to save your work. If 1 teaspoon of butter gets changed to 1 tablespoon because of some kind of data corruption, big deal. So your cookies come out terrible!
It's quite a different matter if the application is coordinating 120 moving parts to direct a radiation beam onto a human body.
The article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?pa...
For those that haven't read it, here's Levesons article on the Therac-25: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
One minor theme in this article is that AECL denied knowledge of any reports of Therac-25 malfunctions even when, looking at a timeline of publicly-known events, such ignorance might be described as "implausible".
They don't seem to have been punished for this, and while I agree that it isn't laudable I also agree that it's not the greatest infraction. AECL really did care about the proper functioning of their machine. They really did look for problems. They cooperated with the FDA to a very great extent. It's hard to fault them for not thinking of testing "what if we enter incorrect configuration information, and then correct it within 8 seconds?"
But tobacco companies are routinely vilified for sitting on cigarette mortality data, as if this was by itself enough to make them irredeemable. They didn't even get off with a light punishment, much less the zero punishment AECL received. I suspect the difference, in the minds of many, is that AECL was a benign company advancing a useful purpose, while tobacco companies sold a product whose only use was to kill the operator. But that was legal then and remains legal today -- how can it be the justification for punishing them extra-hard for otherwise minor problems? AECL's misrepresentedly-unsafe product didn't even kill the operator; it killed random sick people who trusted the hospitals.
Currently, the same mistakes made in the eighties with Therac-25 are being made in many radiation therapy devices. The two NY Times articles (Pulitzer Prize winning) in 2010 and 2011 describe some of the newer cases.
What's shocking to me is that the incidents are always reported in isolation. People become briefly outraged, then the furor dies down until the next death.
Many of the comments in this thread suggest that people can't or won't face the fact that this is a current, ongoing problem of great complexity.
A couple of comments mentioned the coverage of Therac-25 in schools. Very little of what is taught in schools makes it into the programming of radiation therapy devices. History has shown that schooling is not a sufficient solution.
Other comments claim (erroneously) that the FDA is attending to the problem. The FDA has been carefully defanged by the medical device lobby. The FDA has gotten smarter, but has nowhere near the funding to keep pace with its charge and never will.
I wish I could say that I see some hope but I don't see it.
Of course, sometimes hospitals aren't logical, air circulation between rooms comes to mind. And here, I'm sure everyone just trusts the machines because they paid a lot of money for them and it's always worked in the past ...
Because money
As someone with a computer science degree who was warned of such risks and studied the Therac-25 in my classes, this sentence made me realize how far we have to go as professionals. Something seemingly so simple as incrementing a number, one of the most common things done in a program, can cause serious problems (of course we have more help with this now than in the mid 80's). Other people must read things like that and cement any distrust they have in computers and computer programmers. And they're probably right to.
I'd say 200, not twenty.
It amazes me that merely one programmer was trusted with building the software for a radiation beam canon.
But keep in mind that at that time, it may have well been the only programmer on the project, and that the manager was not likely qualified to read code.
