A Multnomah County Circuit Court jury awarded $7.8 million to the family of Wendi Lui, a Portland woman whose suspicious lung mass went unreported on breast-screening scans two years in a row.
The 11-day trial ended this week. The question in front of the jurors was narrower than the award, and harder to file away: when a breast MRI also shows the lung, does anyone have to read that part of the picture? The Oregonian/OregonLive, in reporting by Aimee Green, described a jury that found Dr. Kari A. Thomas at fault in Lui’s death and found a Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center radiologist negligent.
What The 2018 Scan Already Showed
Lui was 46 when she had her first breast MRI at Legacy Good Samaritan in Northwest Portland in 2018. She received that scan in addition to mammography because she had dense breasts and a family history of breast cancer. The family had just moved from New Jersey after Legacy recruited her husband, Gene Lui, a psychiatrist, for a job.
Estate lawyers said the 2018 MRI showed a mass of about 1 centimeter in one lung, and that the cancer was visible on her breast MRIs starting that year. By the 2019 scan, the mass had grown to about 2 centimeters. Thomas, employed by Diagnostic Imaging NW, reviewed the 2019 images. The mass was not reported as suspicious in either year…