A preliminary systematic literature review of the use of formal methods in medical software systems

The use of formal methods is often recommended to guarantee the provision of necessary services and to assess the correctness of critical properties, such as safety, security and reliability, in medical and healthcare systems. Several research groups have proposed and applied formal methods related techniques to the design and development of medical software and systems. However, a systematic and inclusive survey with some form of analysis is still missing in this domain. For this reason, we have collected the relevant literature on the use of formal methods to the modeling, design, development, verification and validation of medical software systems. We apply the well-known systematic literature review technique and we run several queries in order to obtain information that can be useful for people working in this area. We present some research questions and the data answering these questions. We also discuss some limitations of the adopted approach and how to address these issues in order to have a comprehensive survey.