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.
In 2020, a radiologist identified it as suspicious after it had tripled in volume. Surgeons removed the mass that year. By then the disease had spread. Lui was diagnosed with advanced-stage non-small cell lung cancer, including cancer in four lymph nodes. She had never smoked.
Stephen Voorhees said medical standards require radiologists to examine the whole image, not only the tissue a scan was ordered to check. A breast MRI ordered for dense tissue and family history had, on the estate's account, already been showing a lung mass.
From A Bridge Swim To A Late Diagnosis
Rachel O'Neal put figures on the delay. If the cancer had been diagnosed by 2019, she said, Lui's chance of survival would have been 85% to 90%. When it was discovered in 2020, after it had spread, that figure was 26%.
The year before the diagnosis, Lui finished the 11-mile Portland bridge swim in five hours. She then spent more than three years in chemotherapy, radiation and other treatment. Doctors declared her in remission twice.
She died in December 2023 at 51, several years after the cancer spread, at the family's Southwest Portland home. Her death was physician-assisted under Oregon's Death with Dignity Act. Her son was 17.
Never-smokers account for 10% to 20% of lung cancer cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lui's cancer was non-small cell lung cancer, the same type Pope Leo was diagnosed with in October 2026.
Offers That Required Silence
Gene Lui sued the medical providers in 2024. He resigned from Legacy shortly afterward. He later moved to California to help patients cope with the psychological toll of cancer.
The estate received repeated settlement offers from Legacy Health and Diagnostic Imaging NW. Those offers included stipulations that the institutions were not at fault and that he would not discuss the case. He rejected a substantial offer because he did not want to be silenced.
He said he pursued a trial to expose the medical errors and encourage change, and that he hoped the verdict would make radiologists more careful. A deal that cleared the institutions and barred him from talking would have produced the opposite record.
A Legacy Health spokesperson declined to comment. A lawyer for Diagnostic Imaging NW said Thomas acted as a competent medical provider.
Two Institutions, One Set Of Images
The jury's findings do not collapse into a single employer. Thomas worked for Diagnostic Imaging NW and reviewed the 2019 scan. Jurors also found a radiologist at Legacy Good Samaritan negligent in Lui's death. The scans at issue were done at that Northwest Portland hospital, starting with the 2018 breast MRI.
Women's Healthcare Associates lists Thomas as a radiologist specializing in women's imaging who works for Diagnostic Imaging NW. The page describes her as one of a team of outside radiologists who examine screening mammograms and ultrasounds completed at that clinic for possible abnormalities. That is her listed practice, not the site of Lui's Legacy scans.
The $7.8 million award is the figure jurors returned after 11 days. Gene Lui is now in California, doing the work he took up after leaving Legacy, with a verdict he said he wanted radiologists to read as a reason to look more carefully.
