AI incident ·
Zoetis Vetscan Imagyst Allegedly Misclassified Dog's Cancerous Tumor, Leading to Second Surgery and Death
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 that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. 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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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