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An Automatic Virus Scan Crashed A Critical System As Doctors Performed Heart Surgery

Discussion in 'Biomedical Engineering' started by Egyptian Doctor, Aug 11, 2016.

  1. Egyptian Doctor

    Egyptian Doctor Moderator Verified Doctor

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    A critical medical device being used by doctors performing heart surgery crashed after an antivirus scanner opened in the middle of the procedure.

    The incident occurred at an unnamed hospital in February, according to a report to the Food and Drug Administration. Doctors were performing a cardiac catheterization procedure — running a long, thin tube through an artery or vein up to the heart to get diagnostic data.

    In this case, the data was supposed to be sent to a computer monitoring station that's connected to a device called a Merge Hemo, which gives real-time monitoring of the patient. Instead, the antivirus scan started its hourly run, running through files associated with the Merge that caused it to completely crash.

    "In the middle of a heart catheterization procedure, the hemo monitor pc lost communication with the hemo client and the hemo monitor went black," the FDA report said. "Information obtained from the customer indicated that there was a delay of about 5 minutes while the patient was sedated so that the application could be rebooted."

    The report did not name the antivirus software in question, though most are known to run hourly, daily, or weekly scans. But the FDA concluded that it was the hospital at fault, since the manufacturer of the Hemo explicitly instructs customers to configure their antivirus software to skip over its own files, lest something like this could happen.

    The device was down for about five minutes, which the FDA said could have resulted in "harm to the patient." However, it wrote, "the procedure was completed successfully once the application was rebooted."

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