 |
A Baltimore Sun story about flaws in software coding for medical devices featured expert commentary by Professor Rance Cleaveland (CS/ISR).
Reporter Jonathan Rockoff wrote: "Microprocessors run everything from patient monitors to artificial pancreases, and potential software flaws are a growing concern. A product might not malfunction because it was poorly designed or badly made—the traditional suspects—but because the computer code running it includes a mistake. The impact of that glitch can be increasingly serious because the latest automation is removing the doctors and nurses who watched for machine mix-ups."
Teams must pore over the entire code, looking for tiny flaws in the logic that could have disastrous consequences, Rockoff reports. Powerful computers use programs called "static analyzers" to explore all the moves that a piece of software might take.
"There really is sort of a revolution in the way these control systems are built now," Cleaveland told the reporter. The ISR professor is an expert in static analysis who has worked with the Food and Drug Administration.
Read the story at the Baltimore Sun web site.
July 16, 2008
|
