Therac-25
Radiotherapy machine involved in six accidents / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Therac-25?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
The Therac-25 is 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 Compagnie générale de radiologie (CGR) of France).[1]
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
The Therac-25 was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation.[2]: 425 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.[3] These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics, software engineering, and computer ethics. Additionally, the overconfidence of the engineers[2]: 428 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.