Radiation therapy planning-software overdoses
A New York Times investigation documented a series of radiation therapy overdoses and errors across multiple US hospitals over nearly a decade, some causing severe injury or death, tied to complex treatment-planning software.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
A New York Times investigation documented a series of radiation therapy overdoses and errors across multiple US hospitals over nearly a decade, some causing severe injury or death, tied to complex treatment-planning software.
What the software actually got wrong
Investigators found that the treatment-planning software for advanced techniques like intensity-modulated radiation therapy was complex enough that data-entry mistakes and misconfigured software parameters could go undetected by clinical staff, in some cases delivering radiation doses many times higher than intended.
Investigators found that the treatment-planning software for advanced techniques...
Investigators found that the treatment-planning software for advanced techniques like intensity-modulated radiation therapy was complex enough that data-entry mistakes and misconfigured software parameters could go undetected by clinical staff, in some cases delivering radiation doses many times higher than intended.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
Schedule a demonstration, or explore how Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA use the Common Defect Enumeration.