Death machine

The Therac-25 was a computer-controlled radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) in 1982 after the Therac-6 and Therac-20 units (the earlier units had been produced in partnership with CGR of France).
It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors (also known as race conditions), it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering. Additionally the overconfidence of the engineers and lack of proper due diligence to resolve reported software bugs are highlighted as an extreme case where the engineers' overconfidence in their initial work and failure to believe the end users' claims caused drastic repercussions.Therac-25 - Wikipedia
A commission attributed the primary cause to general poor software design and development practices rather than single-out specific coding errors. In particular, the software was designed so that it was realistically impossible to test it in a clean automated way.Leveson, Nancy (1995). "Safeware: System Safety and Computers. Appendix A: Medical Devices: The Therac-25" (PDF). Addison-Wesley. Via Wikipedia.
The high-current electron beam struck the patients with approximately 100 times the intended dose of radiation, and over a narrower area, delivering a potentially lethal dose of beta radiation. The feeling was described by patient Ray Cox as "an intense electric shock", causing him to scream and run out of the treatment room.Casey, Steven. Set Phasers On Stun - Design and Human Error. Aegean Publishing Company. pp. 11–16. Via Wikipedia. Several days later, radiation burns appeared, and the patients showed the symptoms of radiation poisoning; in three cases, the injured patients later died as a result of the overdose.Rose, Barbara Wade. "Fatal Dose - Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors". www.ccnr.org. Retrieved 14 June 2016. Via Wikipedia.
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Death by machine; Medical error; Software error; Software-induced death; Death by software; Fatal therapy
Medical machinery; Medical device
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