AI incident ·
Zoetis Vetscan Imagyst Allegedly Misclassified Dog's Cancerous Tumor, Leading to Second Surgery and Death
On this page 7 sections
In brief
An AI system built by Zoetis and AI diagnostic system developers and deployed by Veterinarians, Columbia Veterinary Hospital (The Dalles and 2 others allegedly harmed Unnamed 11-year-old Belgian Tervuren, Pets and 4 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 1 report
What happened
In October 2025, Columbia Veterinary Hospital in The Dalles, Oregon reportedly used Zoetis's Vetscan Imagyst AI to analyze a rapidly growing neck mass in an 11-year-old Belgian Tervuren. The system allegedly classified the mass as inflammatory, while a later biopsy found aggressive cancer. The hospital alleges the first surgery failed to remove all cancer, requiring a second operation; the dog died from complications. Zoetis allegedly later apologized and said similar incidents had occurred.
Editor's notes
Incident ID date is 10/01/2025, an approximation based on reporting that the incident occurred in October 2025. Lawsuit filed 07/30/2026. Incident ID created 08/08/2026.
Laws on record for this risk area
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Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (1)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Veterinarians Columbia Veterinary Hospital (The Dalles, Oregon) AI diagnostic system deployers
- Alleged developer
- Zoetis AI diagnostic system developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Unnamed 11-year-old Belgian Tervuren Pets Pet owners Epistemic integrity Dogs Animal life
AI systems implicated
Vetscan ImagystAI-enabled decision support systemsAI diagnostic systems
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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- Intent
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Related incidents
Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.
Source record: incident #1631 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report