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Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
21–30 of 211 posts
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#22https://xkcd.com/463/ The whole structure is wrong. I used to work in medical equipment repair. Windows Embedded is running so many devices it's not funny. But it's not just Windows that's the problem. I put a linux-system on a PACS network to diagnose equipment. It was a headless, and we asked the IT group to block it off from the Internet. Hospital IT: "Does it have antivirus?" Me: "..."
List of FDA medical equipment recalls for 2016
http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...
At least three of them are Class 1 - May cause death
And all of those are software related, none run Windows
http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...
http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...
http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
correlation doesn't imply causation.... except when someone selected windows, and then made 50 other moronic decisions also. half the work done in this industry is just dealing with stupid decisions made by stupid people. i just accept this now.
But when Windows is chosen because it is easier to find coders who will 'remain within the budget' (cheapcheap) and cannot even make sure the virus scanner doesn't run during procedures or at all it goes a bit too far.
"Cheaper" or "remain within the budget" doesn't excuse using inadequate parts that don't meet the design requirements.
Unfortunately, this total disregard for safety isn't just software anymore. When we stat skipping lessons that we've know for a looooooonng time (such as why a split bobbin is an important feature in a transformer[1]), we have evidence of a serious need for strongly enforced regulation.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#24Why on earth is medical equipment running standard Windows? This is the ideal location for some basic RTOS or even just an embedded Linux. Seems like a huge cost and risk for no gain.
I never realized just how lucky I was to have been born when I was. I can't imagine building embed devices which aren't running a very simply super loop or an ARM RTOS.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
But when Windows is chosen because it is easier to find coders who will 'remain within the budget' (cheapcheap) and cannot even make sure the virus scanner doesn't run during procedures or at all it goes a bit too far.
"Cheaper" or "remain within the budget" doesn't excuse using inadequate parts that don't meet the design requirements. Unfortunately, this total disregard for safety isn't just software anymore. When we stat skipping lessons that we've know for a looooooonng time (such as why a split bobbin is an important feature in a transformer[1]), we have evidence of a serious need for strongly enforced regulation. [1] https://n…
I know it doesn't, but unfortunately it is often how it works. More than I want to remember I have seen things like 'but lives depend on this!' or '100s of millions can get lost if this doesn't work!' and yet when the RFPs come back and something like InfoSys is chosen because big name and cheaper than experts in the field.
Edit;
> we have evidence of a serious need for strongly enforced regulation.
Better education? But I guess strongly enforced regulation will force companies to not go for the cheapest solutions they can get away with which in turn will require people with actual knowledge in the field which will require better education, somehow.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#26This situation is even funnier(and sadly very seriously flawed) in Japan.
Medical equipment require an authorization to use. Any change to the medical equipment requires another authorization or it's prohibited.
By "any change" , it includes Windows Update(it changes the system obviously).
The result: they use anti-malware software to protect(or rather, believed to protect) unpatched Windows.
At least one anti-malware software company(Trend Micro), marketing that their software can protect the medical equipment in such situation.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#27https://xkcd.com/463/ The whole structure is wrong. I used to work in medical equipment repair. Windows Embedded is running so many devices it's not funny. But it's not just Windows that's the problem. I put a linux-system on a PACS network to diagnose equipment. It was a headless, and we asked the IT group to block it off from the Internet. Hospital IT: "Does it have antivirus?" Me: "..."
Thank you; I hadn't spotted that XKCD quote about teacher and condom, but it will be very appropriate the next time someone asks me about the antivirus in the server software we do (on Linux).
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#28https://xkcd.com/463/ The whole structure is wrong. I used to work in medical equipment repair. Windows Embedded is running so many devices it's not funny. But it's not just Windows that's the problem. I put a linux-system on a PACS network to diagnose equipment. It was a headless, and we asked the IT group to block it off from the Internet. Hospital IT: "Does it have antivirus?" Me: "..."
List of FDA medical equipment recalls for 2016 http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48... At least three of them are Class 1 - May cause death And all of those are software related, none run Windows http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48... http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48... http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...
That is astoundingly horrifying, especially the Class 1's which were distributed for over five years.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#29Putting antivirus on equipment at all indicates a much bigger problem. That the equipment is somehow configured to be susceptible to viruses.
Well at least in EN62304 the installation of AV on medical devices is recommended. The whole thing reads like as if it was written by people who picked up a few buzzwords and read a few articles in a computer magazine.
Re: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
#30Why on earth is medical equipment running standard Windows? This is the ideal location for some basic RTOS or even just an embedded Linux. Seems like a huge cost and risk for no gain.
I believe that it's strongly related to the dashboard software being targeted towards "familiarity" by the doctors / customers and having old GUI-centric software from back in the mid-90s ported to run on Windows over the decades prettied up back when there was nothing really viable for end-user accessible embedded systems besides even more grotesquely expensive custom software with even less capabilities and far worse SDKs than anything under Windows back in, say, 1994. This isn't that different to me than banking software with a COBOL backend with Java middleware and a PHP frontend that's extremely common for retail banking sector.
Given the sheer amount of overhead in enterprise BS medical hardware has (read: sales people likely get the biggest chunk of the absorbed costs) it wouldn't be a surprise to me that the engineering teams amount to a skeleton crew while 70%+ of the personnel involved are non-engineers that override the professional decisions of the engineers.