Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:
- This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo.
- They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true "full body" in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that's why we use CT for lung screening!)
- The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite - small, deep structures.
- "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians, but I in general have no problem with people collecting data on themselves where they can. To me it's similar to heart rate monitors or home blood pressure cuffs. The main issue here is education, so that patients know what the data is and is not telling them. The more complex the data, the more difficult that is.
- Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that "it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs", I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.
> The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited.
Radiologist as well. Remember this is full wave inversion not pulsed wave B mode. You can get much more useful information from both high low frequency and capture transmitted waves.
There is promise with this and we use it for example with MRgFUS. With advanced computational models or patient specific CT/ZTE MR aberration correction it is theoretically very feasible to image the brain with ultrasound, whether that’s more useful than say portable low field strength MR is a different question altogether.
> This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT.
Not to be pedantic but since this is a tech forum I would clarify that FWI US is computed tomography by definition (at least in this and many applications). Gas degrades conventional CT too, it’s just worse with US as you have little to no forward propagation and of course innumerable interfaces in the lungs to reflect and scatter.
Yes, I was thinking about FUS as well! There are clearly ways to penetrate bone, but I have not seen it used for imaging, only for ablation. But I am not an expert there and it sounds like you have more knowledge in that area than I do.
What's the use of FWI for a moving target - which someone floating in a spa most definitely will be?
This is a fever dream, not a practical diagnostic technology.
I can imagine it being useful if you happened to own an imaging product and wanted to train a model on human body shapes and sizes.
But dunking people in a golden spa - why golden? why not pink or teal? - and waving a ring of US over them, at distances which make high resolution impractical, to tell them their medical fortunes is... eccentric.
I'm being scathing because there's no solid science behind this, and if there had been solid science MJ would have published it in a paper.
This is pure marketing. And if you're going to do that, you should at least include some dolphin petting.
Full wave inversion uses all of the information from the wave and more intense computational tomography to image structures that pulse wave B mode cannot, though gases are still a problem. Computationally, if you squint, it's similar to the work Midjourney does with AI image generation, as it progressively generates a structure that fits the data.
Ultrasonic waves can penetrate most structures in humans, including the brain. For example, with focused ultrasound (as they mentioned with MRgFUS) you can burn specific structures in the middle of the brain without any incision.
To use this for imaging, you need lots of transducers (MRgFUS typically uses 1024 for ablation, and Midjourney is proposing 358,000 for imaging) and massive advances in computational tomography capabilities. There will still likely be pockets of low confidence where there's a lot of air, like in the lungs. But with sufficient information on what's happening around those areas, you'd still have something that's medically useful.
Ultrasound researcher here: this work is almost certainly not full wave inversion. You're right that FWI can be done in this kind of setup. Notably, a lot of people are trying to use circular arrays of ultrasound sensors to do FWI, particularly in the brain or the breast. But, it's a challenging inverse problem to solve and as far as I know, it's still extremely slow - nowhere near realtime.
The data they show is almost certainly a normal beamforming algorithm like delay and sum, possibly with some simple speed of sound correction. The most similar paper I know of is here in Nature Biomedical Engineering from a team at Caltech. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4
I do a lot of MRI analysis including segmentation of small structures in the hippocampus called the hippocampal subfields. To collect these segmentations, we collect partial-field-of-view high in-plane resolution T2-weighted images on a 3 or 7 Tesla magnet. These sequences are generally only included in research protocols if the research specifically cares about hippocampal subfields...therefore they are rarely collected. There have been attempts to enable segmentation of these small structures using lower resolution T1-weighted scans, leveraging deep-learning or other models trained on concurrent T2w high resolution scans and the lower resolution scans within the same subject, allowing the model to predict the higher resolution information from the lower resolution inputs. This produces spectacularly beautiful segmentation on shitty data. Data whose resolution is about the same as the thickness of the structures you are segmenting or less. The problem is this: 1. The lower resolution image barely has any information in it on these smaller structures 2. The accuracy of the resulting segmentation depends entirely on how much the person fits the training distribution. But much research is on specific populations: children, autism, etc. 3. Some big names in imaging analysis tools have published these tools, lending their credibility to them. 4. The beautiful segmentations and (3) tend to convince non hippocampal experts that the resulting data is trustworthy, especially to an eager beaver researcher trying to maximize the impact of their already collected datasets.
I've rejected a number of papers for this.
But my point is this. Midjourney Medical might train a model to produce pretty images with this technique, but the more they need to depend on deep-learning models to get usable data, the more that the match between the training distribution and patient will matter.
This is a critical point. I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?
> I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?
Related to that point, I was so turned off by Midjourney's post about this because it absolutely reeked of all the red flags I've seen over the past 2 decades when Silicon Valley-types try to "disrupt" the medical field. The post was titled "Midjourney Medical", but it approached everything from a "wellness" perspective, i.e. how can individuals "optimize" their health by numerous scans/tests/analyses, it's a spa not a clinic, etc. etc.
Where were the research papers? The peer-reviewed articles? If you're truly trying to "disrupt" some area of medicine, it doesn't make you immune to the peer-review process.
I'll fully admit I'm not qualified to assess the claims made in the article, but if Midjourney wants to be taken seriously, I would hope they would avoid an approach that looks a lot more like Theranos in their early days, vs a sober analysis of how their tech compares to existing standards of care.
I'm not a medical doctor at all, just an engineer who works in medical devices and I'm definitely sceptical about this.
I'm not totally sure of the value of an imaging system that only gives you very low resolution images if they're not accurate enough to determine anything from. You'd need a secondary CT or MRI anyway so why not skip to that?
My real concern is the dependence on external servers to reconstruct the images
Edit: From reading other people's comments, people are acting as if this is the first device trying to sell itself as improving pre-diagnosis imaging and this is totally revolutionary. This is not, and if any of the other products have convinced the entire medical industry that frequent imaging is beneficial then neither will this
"why not skip to that?" MRIs and CT scans are expensive, require referrals, and you usually can't get them without believing you already have an issue. If this technology can get to a point where it's high enough resolution, cheap enough to just have at spas, and shared across the world then people will be able to know if/when they should get that secondary scan before symptoms start.
Not a physician. Some observations on these statements.
The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have."
The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?"
Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to look at things has a tendency to reveal information that we never knew we needed.
For example, for years I thought of blood sugar as something that was either in a good or bad range. Then I tried a continuous blood sugar monitor. The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening. There's so much more to learn when you get a higher resolution (temporal in that case) view into your body.
Another wonderfully hopeful example is the retinal imaging ML work done by google. A completely non-invasive image of the retina for diabetic issues, that also happened to be able to predict things like age, sex, smoking status, previous cardiac events and more! Just take high-res pictures of things! The body is interconnected in ways that you can infer from one system so much about others.
So while I don't think anything the Dr. said is "wrong", I think it represents a very common blinkered mindset of pragmatic practitioners who need to deliver reliable performance daily.
Your points are well taken, and I think this is the fundamental struggle of anyone who works in a narrow and deep field. It's truly difficult to see things from a different point of view sometimes. It certainly could turn out that this ultrasound setup gives truly new information, but, it isn't really a new way of generating an image, it's the same physics we've used to generate images from sound waves for decades, and that modality comes with some pretty hard physical limitations that this demo does not directly address. Time will tell, if they don't run out of money. I'm hopeful!
It's true that sometimes deeply experienced professionals are less likely to discover or accept novel methods based on new approaches or technologies. Unfortunately, in this case MJ's proposed product is being deceptively presented to appear as if it's the kind of bold new approach we all hope to see in medicine - but it's not. It's a repackaging of an existing product that's already on the market.
MJ is buying the transducer chips used in Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device (it's not an R&D license, they're literally buying the same chip). The repackaging is to turn it into a contactless, 360 degree-at-once, 60 second full body scanner. Every aspect of the repackaging provides the same singular benefit over the Butterfly device: convenience. Unfortunately, every aspect of the repackaging has the same two downsides: lower resolution (meaning lower diagnostic value) and higher cost.
Spoiler alert: moving the imaging transducers 200-400 times farther away from your organs and introducing a large volume of water between the transducer and your skin in no way improves resolution or diagnostic value (quite the opposite (exponentially!)). Having 40 transducers on a hula hoop ring that far away offers no value over having one transducer much closer and moving to as many angles as necessary to image the volume of interest - except it might be a few minutes faster.
So, this isn't an "exciting new approach to medical imaging." It's a marketing repackage of an existing medical product into a non-medical, higher-cost, 'spa experience' with trendy, tech-adjacent appeal and vaguely medical-ish window dressing (it's carefully disclaimed has having no medical value in this form). Since the exact same chip is already available in a much less expensive, far more ideal form that's fully repositionable to any angle, is closer (and can deform skin to get closer still), the real question is how much medically-relevant diagnostic value could MJ's repackage of the same chip offer over the existing better, cheaper implementation? Butterfly's version is already FDA approved with proven diagnostic value. And all of MJ's hype around 'AI-powered' isn't about improving diagnostics, it's only necessary to recover at least some signal from the hurricane of noise and multi-path issues created by the adding MJ's cool-looking convenience features. But slowly being lowered into that tank with the neat ambient light ring sure looks sci-fi, right?
Exponentially would make it computationally intractable by definition, and is the proposal suggestion that having simultaneous sensors can be used to reconstruct more information than the conventional way of using a handheld single sensor? Is that plausible?
Good question. Trying to 'steel-man' MJ's approach, that was the only possible benefit vs the existing Butterfly product which I hadn't crossed out yet, so I asked the only actual radiologist here about the possibility of having additional receivers off-axis from the emitter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590631).
But frankly, I'm losing interest trying to glean what someone might be thinking, when they're being so intentionally opaque while making such grandiose vague claims. The bottom line is, if they really thought this way of nerfing Butterfly's chip '9-steps back' with disadvantages, would truly unlock 12-steps forward in actual medical imaging utility, they wouldn't be launching it as a 'feature' of a vanity spa with nothing but vague 'tech visionary' puffery.
I'm doing this now, and the thing I find most surprising is that there seems to be some invisible persistent state that gives high or low sugar a sort of momentum - so if I've been doing a fair amount of physical activity for a month, I can lay slugabed for two days and still drive to have a slice of pizza in the afternoon without trouble; but if I've been slacking on the activity piece, or arguing with my spouse, or travelling and eating a lot of dubious things, I can walk five kms to a pizza place, eat the slice, walk the 5 kms back, and it will still spike. Also I have issues with the CGM being higher than the prick-blood test, like 40 points higher rather consistently. A1C is still dropping, but the CGM numbers are more directionally accurate than numerically accurate.
You don't know if the opinion is expert. You don't know who that person is or what credentials they even have. Blindly trusting something that sounds right is a terrible way to inform yourself.
I'd agree more if MidJourney had decided to announce their product plans with a white paper instead of glossy 'product vision' marketing spin and virtually no information as to how they hope to solve the vast technical leaps necessary to convert the transducer chip they licensed from Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device into a contactless, 360 degree, 60 second full body scanner.
Given MJ's extraordinary claims and lack of detail, I thought the GP's response was well-calibrated, especially given MJ's unfortunate choice to lean into vaguely implying this has 'medical' utility, despite providing zero evidence (or even plausible theory) their approach could ever have diagnostic value greater than Butterfly's FDA-approved, handheld, full contact USB pocket scanner which is available now and plugs into a mobile phone. They are using 40 of the exact same transducer chip (designed for full contact use) from 200-400 times farther away. You can use the existing full contact Butterfly scanner today and just move it to 40 different angles. It would take a couple minutes longer, provide vastly greater resolution and is proven to have diagnostic value.
Idea for a website/documentary -- have experts respond to a piece of news, or provide commentary. Put a few expert pieces alongside a few LLM outputs, have people guess/work out which is which. Have the same people tell you why.
If on a website, rank the results; present the 'how I worked it out' info for the best spotters (and you could interview them). Keep the answers secret for a few weeks, then reveal them in a way that the game is still playable.
It's repeatable, every few months you could interview new experts (or the old ones again), get new models.
Kinda like the critical thinking version of images of a pelican on a bike.
I love your idea and would enjoy seeing the results of that controlled experiment.
I'm also interested in the broader impact of using LLMs in place of web search for general Q&A when we want 'to know things'. It's pretty clear the way LLMs are being used for knowledge acquisition now is often less accurate while 'feeling' more certain. Even if we set aside explicit hallucinations, I suspect it's still less accurate.
It's not meant as a slight against you, but an observation on people blindly trusting Internet commenters in a time where our trust is (or should be?) at an all-time low for such content, so we should check our priors to ensure what we're consuming can be trusted and is verifiably true as LLMs exude confidently incorrect behavior.
I want to point out that you are posting from a 5-months old account (squarely within a time frame where LLM-powered accounts would be created), with an UUID-sounding username, claiming a 10-year-old professional history in the field, and using those credentials to bring up the possibility that a 14-year-old account claiming to be an MD with `md` in the username and _lots_ of comments is LLM-generated and asking for skepticism.
It's not particularly helpful; you could easily have done the 5 minutes of work.
Congrats, you've discovered people are always joining an anonymous platform, and some want pseudonymity? If I put "md" in my name, am I suddenly a doctor then? Your reading comprehension needs some work, I've been working for 16 years and it isn't being used as a cudgel to appeal to authority, but sharing some context about who I am and what my perspectives are.
Someone using md in their account name for 14 years is really committing to the bit if they aren’t a doctor.
I went back in their comment history before LLMs existed and found comments where they claim to be a doctor and sound like they know what they are taking about. I’m not a doctor but my wife and many of our friends are, so I know what they sound like.
I appreciate your feedback, I did not dig through their comment history to make that discovery, but saw someone showing full trust in a random user on an anonymous forum and wanted to encourage more critical behavior.
I get the intention, but you made an assumption that the person you replied to didn’t spend 30 seconds find some more supporting evidence before they made their post.
But as far as trust goes, Hacker News has historically been a fairly high trust community. LLMs have the potential to change this dynamic, but I don’t think encouraging people to assume that every post is an LLM is helpful. I don’t think a community with that level of distrust is possible, and at that point we should just all walk away.
Maybe it's the time I've joined at, but I've noticed a lot of bot users and stories which has soured my view a bit. Thanks for engaging in good faith and giving me context, I'll try to have more grace in the future
The parent comment is demonstrating the exact type of internet savvy critical thinking that you’re ostensibly arguing for, but you seem to be reflexively defensive.
Making an ad hominem attack on a random poster asking for critical thinking on who to trust and then making false claims is not "internet savvy critical thinking" since they can't string two thoughts together coherently (a bio blurb vs. an appeal to authority in a random comment).
"Blindly trusting" is not the same as "learning some new questions to ask about the validity of the given claims". The Midjourney announcement is not providing detailed medical credentials either.
They're using "CT" in its literal sense: tomography*, using computers. In this case, ultrasound is the penetrating wave rather than x-ray. It is of course a very different thing than what the medical world knows as "CT" today.
we can do tomography on any round-robin-rectify multi-pov source, doesn't have to be x-ray is just de facto use in medicine, closer to at min marketing ed problem
> Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine,
True. My more nuanced take on it: For most chronic conditions (including cancer) diagnostics have improved but resolution has not. The PR machine of course hypes things to make it seem like we have more cures today that in the past. What is have is more diagnostics and more procedures.
That's because there isn't any data yet, at least not enough from real patients to be meaningful. I would love to see some of the raw imaging data they have generated though, if that's what you mean.
> I would love to see some of the raw imaging data
Just look at images from the Butterfly IQ3 handheld ultrasound device which has been on the market a while (https://www.butterflynetwork.com/iq3). Midjourney is repackaging 40 of the exact same chip around a big, non-contact ring. Since MJ is placing the devices 200 to 400 times farther away from your organs and sending sound waves through a large volume of water before contacting your skin (instead of a thin smear of gel) the images will be much lower fidelity.
Given that current ultrasound probe technology (including butterfly) relies on the probe being essentially in contact with the tissue being imaged, it’s hard to imagine how this set up can be effective with the imaged volume so far from the transducers, since there will be a huge amount of dissipation in the water bath, but maybe they have found a way to solve that? Also, I imagine that the quality of the images, such as they are, will fall off very quickly in larger patients. Will be interesting to see.
Exactly my concern too. There are techniques like synthetic aperture focusing which can correct some of these errors to some degree but they're complex and have harsh limits of their own. It's always better to not have the errors introduced by the distance and water volume in the first place. The thing which makes no sense about this entire approach is we already can not have those errors.
I've been looking up relevant data and reading some papers to determine if I'm missing something there but, so far, the approach looks pretty much 'all downside' with the few upsides being: 1. Faster to image full body, 2. Don't have to have some technician poking you with an ultrasound wand, 3. Looks cool?
But I'm just an imaging and DSP guy, you're the actual radiologist. If you don't mind there's one question I'm not sure about. Trying to 'strong-man' the product concept, the only potential benefit of the approach I haven't crossed out is if there's any meaningful value from having additional simultaneous receivers off-axis from the emitter? I mean value which can't be gained from just moving a single emitter to another axis, grabbing more images and then cross-registering those. Even then, the off-axis receivers are always co-planar with the emitter, which seems like it would greatly limit any utility.
The downside column I've got so far is vast... and it's not just distance, there's also the turbulance in the water, micro-bubbles from the ongoing submersion of body and platform into the tank, the thermal disruption at the boundary layer, the fact the human is freestanding with no support while being submerged means they'll be far less stationary than a human comfortably reclined on a ultrasound table, it goes on and on.
Right, this is where I'm at, in trying to 'strong-man' it. CT is great as a source and a detector, but when you add multiple detectors and can use scattering to your advantage, we're able to lower rad dosage for comparable images. So, yeah, what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better than we thought.
That's the only way this thing adds up in my head.
> what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better
Yes, that's the most charitable 'Steel-man' possibility I've still got open. Still a lot of unknowns but I suspect they're just unknown to me and probably already known to those in the field. It's not like this off-axis receivers concept is remotely new in computational imaging. So I went looking for priors and proxies that use the same idea - and found a bunch. There are dual-wand, dual-leaf and quad-leaf 'flex-jaw' arrays that basically just add extra receivers on tilting 'wings' to conform to cylindrical and non-uniform shapes. They don't seem to be used much for medical imaging but are common in things like metallurgical inspection, materials analysis, etc.
I'm still unclear why they aren't used much in medical but I suspect it has to do with the fact that medical ultrasound is highly constrained. It can work well in fat and soft-tissues but bone absorbs and reflects ultrasound fiercely and different tissue densities respond differently. This makes off-axis receivers likely to be occluded, reducing how often it contributes to improving imaging.
My biggest question about the MJ product hypothesis isn't whether it can work, it's whether it will work meaningfully better than easier, cheaper surface-contact methods using the same transducer chips. If it's true that additional off-axis receivers do provide increased value for medical imaging, then it should be even better to do that with a flexible semi-arc of chips that can directly touch the skin. I just don't see how any off-axis benefit can overcome the drastic signal degradation introduced by moving the chips 200-400 times farther way and trying to correct for the turbulent hurricane of that huge liquid volume.
I have a friend who may be dying. It's not cancer but equally dangerous. They caught it early but they're powerless to do anything. We're just watching, waiting, and hoping.
That's generally exactly what we do, which if we need to follow 2x or 10x incidental lesions in the population, leads to cost and availability problems. A lymphoma patient in remission needs follow up scans too, and I don't want them to have to wait 3 months because thousands of people are now following up their benign adrenal adenomas.
The machines are expensive (millions range per MRI scanner), staffing the machines nearly around the clock with highly educated technologists, repair/maintenance of expensive specialized machinery, radiologists to read each scan (esp with a current shortage), means it’s very expensive to set up and run an imaging center. Opening and owning an imaging center used to be seen as fairly lucrative. and many radiology private practices did just that, however, the economics have changed over the years with dropping reimbursements, staffing shortages, etc and now often these imaging centers are seen as a liability rather than an asset.
I feel like the first part of this explanation reminds me of stories about mainframe computers in the 1950-70s - highly expensive special gear that needs special operators. Is there something about the physics of the process standing in the way?
Excluding the cost of X-ray/CT/MRI machines, operating them, getting people to them and through them, sometimes injecting contrast, and sometimes dealing with side effects of said contrast, radiologists, I think. You can scale all of the above except interpretation. AI is the natural next thought for how to scale that part, but it's been thought that this would happen any moment for over a decade.
This is definitely a part of standard follow up for small findings and part of the guidance for incidentally detected lung nodules smaller than <8mm.
I think mammography is a great example. Many people are quite surprised to hear that the Positive Predictive Value of a screening mammography is only in 10-15% range. This despite mammography being a pretty sensitive test. This is because despite good test performance characteristics, applied across a large population of relatively health people, the 2-5% false positive rate is a large number of people.
Statistically overdetection leads to poorer outcomes because interventions have a risk as well. That's why everyone doesn't get a yearly full body CT scan, for example. The current guidelines are based on optimizing for maximum good, and believe it or not some things are best not known about because the risk of dying from it is about the same as the risk of the treatment.
Good word for it. We were a bit worried about something that showed up my my mum's scans, as if an inoperable tangerine-sized lung tumour wasn't a big enough problem. It was a round dot about the size of a pea on her adrenal gland that lit up like crazy in contrast dye. Now, that as you probably know was a worry because oh shit, lymphatic system involvement, that's going to spread like crazy.
But after two years of immunotherapy, and about six years after being detected while the lung cancer is gone, the pea is still there, still as bright as ever, neither getting bigger nor smaller.
No-one is in a hurry to poke at it and see what it is, just in case that turns out to be a mistake.
89 this year and at least got to see her grandchildren start primary school, so good work from your lot and the oncologists!
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.
The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.
I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?
Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.
I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes?
Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?
I think you (and others) are getting caught up in your own worse-case interpretation of the words of that statement, instead of looking at the intent of it.
It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".
The massive data gathering part should only be part of the learning phase of the system imo, once it get a good model of reality it should infer useful knowledge information from few data, like an expert.
Huh? You don't have to come up with an interpretation. The brief says it "looks a lot like today's MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed". They don't explain why having a hundred times as many MRI images would lead to better diagnostic outcomes. It is not like ultrasound scanning is a new idea, and they don't give any particular reason why this suggestion was not used before (other than "...data?")
It's not just about better diagnostic outcomes. Currently MRIs are a horrible, claustrophobic experience, and MRI machines are so insanely expensive that it is a bigger deal just to prescribe one.
So even if it is only as good as an MRI, or even 80% as good as an MRI, if it is much cheaper and much more pleasant to go through, you will get MORE people doing it, and get it prescribed in more situations.
That's at least how I read the benefits, democratization of imaging techniques rather than just improvement.
I think if we already had everyone wearing commercially available continuous glucose monitors and gathered and analyzed that data, we'd already have diagnosed and solved a lot of our most common health problems.
Obviously not all data is useful or meaningful, but even with the tech we already have, there's a ton of it that we're just not collecting or using.
This is a bit of a contrived example. The “megabytes per second per dollar” is clearly in reference to their scanner technology that the say generates terabytes worth of data, with the goal of a scan taking around 60 seconds. So I’m confused about exactly what your point is?
That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
If you don’t want then scan then carry on as usual.
The problem is that it's not clear how useful those terabytes of information are. Ultrasound is very good for certain types of imaging, but the contrast mechanisms available are very limited - super high resolution images of uniform intensity aren't useful. An imaging method isn't useful if it doesn't help you discriminate what you want to see from what you don't. The reason MR is so useful is that it has so many contrasts available (T1, T2, proton density, flow speed, diffusion coefficient, diffusion direction, chemical composition, tissue elasticity, BOLD activation, and many other more esoteric ones). In an hour long scan, even with rapid acquisitions, you usually only get a few gigabytes of data, but that data has a LOT of information about your tissue - that's the reason the scanner keeps starting and stopping and making different noises, it's taking MANY different types of images with complementary information.
I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.
I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.
> That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
This is deeply silly and nonsensical framing. You don't want "lots of data really fast", you want high-quality, diagnostically useful data. If the fastest way to generate that is via 15-minute MRIs, then that is vastly more ideal than a bullshit scan that takes seconds.
I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.
But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
It's funny because these criticisms are similar to the ones that Raymond Damadian faced when he was trying to develop the MRI. He was criticized for just being a doctor and not an NMR specialist, criticized for making bold claims based on the crude initial images that he presented, criticized for being too exuberant about the potential of the technology, criticized for only having a small group of non-expert graduate students and his own self-taught electronics and machining knowledge. He eventually founded his own company to commercialize the technology and even then he fought an uphill battle for 8 more years.
I think the only way you figure out which data has value is by collecting it first. And I don't trust pharma any more than I trust tech.
I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.
> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.
I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.
In a more sane universe, we'd have been further along simply standardizing & centralizing patient records for providers, figuring out base rates, and communicating those base rates to providers.
> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have.
What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”
It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.
This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.
They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.
> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.
> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.
> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it
So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.
I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:
1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes
2) pathologization of normal processes
3) normalization of pathological processes
4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations
5) regulatory capture by care providers
1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.
All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.
The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.
data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochondria, receptor shapes, expressed proteins, etc.). If this company was a bunch of biology grad students getting the AI bug, I'd be hopefully curious, but for a bunch of "generate images" folks to try to go back from low-res images to biology, seems a bit naive. Like not knowing how much DNA and RNA information there is in the body naive. I'm sure their leaders are good at financial engineering, but for effectively "proactively keeping you healthy", mmm, maybe not.
Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc.
As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.
It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.
Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.
We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit.
You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.
True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.
Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.
Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc.
The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.
Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not.
Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
False positives are the primary issue. False positives lead to stress, invasive diagnostic procedures and wasted medical resources. Look into the debate about what is the appropriate age for mammographies and how Apple Watches have resulted in overdiagnosis of heart conditions.
For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.
> Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it.
As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment).
What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege.
Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high.
A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist visits than before. A lot more tests. After months of that all of the scary things were eventually ruled out. And then the values went back to normal. Nobody has an explanation even now.
This is just with a pretty standard battery of tests: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH with reflex, vitamin D. They catch enough bad things that they're generally worth ordering on a regular basis for healthy people at annual physicals. The occasional wild goose chases like what happened with me is the price we pay for catching the more serious things.
I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I have 2 autoimmune disorders/diseases, and I have spent the last 2 decades managing them. One of them (thyroid) is relatively easy, take my synthetic thyroid hormones ever day, and check my levels every 3 months to make sure I'm still good. The other is symptom management, which is less consistent, and a flair up from one causes the other to flair as well. And flairs are particularly hard to handle and function well.
> I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.
Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.
Okay, you're worried about too much data and false positives, but that's a problem you can get around by smoking a pack a day and not going to the doctor. The vast majority of people on the planet have exactly zero hard data on their ailments, and even if they spend their life savings trying to get a clear picture they may never have one.
Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.
The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
If you ask people to rank say 5 things from top to bottom where the first thing at the top is what they are least cost conscious about and the one at bottom is what they are most - I would bet health would at the top slot for most of us. So relatively we would spend (whatever we have) on our health versus other things if we had conviction on the outcome.
People don't do anything with the data they already have, to your point.
Stand on a scale at the same time of day, every day. Track your intake. Track your output. See your PCP for your free AWV-equivalent, and keep an eye on your metrics.
But no, we need GB of scanner outputs because some medically-illiterate (but still the smartest-guy-in-the-room) techbros want them for... reasons.
After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image.
"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.
That's like saying you don't care about the hundreds of kilobytes of your DNA biome you can obtains nowadays for nearly free, you care about being healthy.
My man, YOU USE THOSE bytes for that purpose exactly.
I want to give my money to actual individual doctors who studied this for a decade, have the work and life experience to make informed judgements and decisions to reason about my health. I dont want to pay a company to digitize my body and then sell the data back to me
To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege.
Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.
Maybe you’re only
thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?
I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.
This happens in a number of medical systems of countries across the world and is perfectly feasible, usually through premium subsidies for stuff like planned check ups, buying certain types of food and even installing equipment to monitor your driving behaviour. The thinking is that encouraging customers to be healthy reduces premium claims in the future
1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.
2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.
3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.
4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.
Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.
The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.
I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.
So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.
On the “we don’t know what to do”, I think it’s cool that they are trying something medical with it. Success obviously isn’t assured, probably it isn’t even probable, but I’m happy to see companies try this rather than launch yet another whatever or start a consulting business. I hope as the field (AI generally) matures, more people decide to try life changing stuff with it.
> we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall
My opinion is that the money is in the verticals as the models and harnesses built around them become commodities. Specializing in a vertical, especially where hardware is involved, creates a buffer between companies and the frontier labs. The frontier labs are spreading themselves thin trying to capture verticals like finance or legal but aren’t narrow enough to be as competitive as a company that is going for a more targeted approach.
The branding choice is crazy to me. “Midjourney” is pretty much synonymous with “generated images that aren’t real”. Which is the opposite of what you want when it comes to medical imagery and data.
> “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.
this is pretty normal, i mean you have OpenAI and Anthropic trying the same as well. OpenAI is working on legal stuff [1] and also rolled out (or said they'll roll out) ChatGPT Health [2]. Then there was Sora etc.
These companies need applications for their tokens and someone has to build them. If they can win even with one, that's a net benefit for them no?
The pivot to do things they want as AI research lab is perfectly understandable, but also..weird, like their loyal userbase are mostly creative people, and this pivot have ZERO things to do with those audience at all.
It also gives a vibe that they gives zero damn about to those creatives audience, or the things that made name for them in the past anymore, or that what I feel as their subscriber...
I know that David Holz have his own unique way of doing things but it's still...weird!
to be fair I wouldn't call people operating AI Image generators creative people. At best they're people curious about the technology itself, anybody willing to learn and do it for the sake of being creative does it themselves.
I think you're romanticizing art generation a bit. A lot of it operates like a normal working job, there is no magic "truly creative genuis", a lot of working artists treat it as their jobs and if a tool helps them get their job done, it is helpful.
Not every creative profession is something where you create something you're proud of or you own. You're often just one part of a massive machine working on a project. It's a bit hard to keep sticking to the "creative noble artist" mythical vibe when it's a 9 to 5. And it's not fair to call them not creative just because you feel like it.
Both ”creative mythical noble artist” and ”creative work is just work” are unhelpful strawman arguments. One is elitist, the other is reductionist.
Creativity is neither a property of who you are or what you do. It’s about how you do it. It’s closer to a mindset of curiosity, wonder and play. For example, many programmers have a need for creativity within coding, but don’t feel they get it at their 9-5 job, and instead work a side project (like FOSS, indie game) because it’s a more creative experience. The point is: same person, same activity yet one is more creative than the other.
The art/artifact itself is not creative. It’s the process that’s creative. Building a car can be creative. Buying a car is not. That’s not romanticizing and gatekeeping people who don’t have time to build a car. It would be genuinely misleading to equate those things.
> Creativity is neither a property of who you are or what you do
Then you say:
> It’s closer to a mindset of curiosity, wonder and play.
Which has to be the property of what you do (the process) or who you are (the personality willing to embed those values), right?
> It’s the process that’s creative. Building a car can be creative. Buying a car is not.
Sure, but the process is "what you do" which directly contradicts what you're saying.
> For example, many programmers have a need for creativity within coding, but don’t feel they get it at their 9-5 job, and instead work a side project (like FOSS, indie game) because it’s a more creative experience.
Sure but most programmers don't do it. Simillarly many artists work on projects for companies and their own projects. My point is that you cannot reduce commercial work as not creative just because it's a 9-to-5.
I really fail to understand your point with this comment since it's not really saying anything coherent.
You also say
> The point is: same person, same activity yet one is more creative than the other.
Again, if that person is doing that activity then it is what they do i.e. you're calling the process creative. And in this case, we'll call that same person to be creative since they have the drive to work on their own project after a full 9-5 job. But if they were not doing it, we'll still consider them creative since it is a basic requirement at their 9-5. That is my point - both of them are creative. Degrees may vary depending on subjective perception but that was not what was being discussed.
> Sure, but the process is "what you do" which directly contradicts what you're saying.
”What you do” was just short for the _activity_ that you’re doing, eg ”I am coding” or ”I am building a car”, which does not determine the extent of how creative it is. Building ikea furniture from instructions would be low on the creative scale, whereas making a chair from woodworking might be higher, for most people.
> Sure but most programmers don't do [side projects]. My point is that you cannot reduce commercial work as not creative just because it's a 9-to-5.
Of course not, some people find that perfect match. That said, employment is not optimized for creativity, so it simply appears unusual that it’s conducive to highly creative work. This is my theory of why many programmers pick up hobbies outside of 9-5 where they have better preconditions, whether it’s side projects (same domain) or woodworking (different domain). Some find it at their 9-5, and some don’t feel much urge.
> we'll still consider them creative since it is a basic requirement at their 9-5. That is my point - both of them are creative. […] Degrees may vary depending on subjective perception but that was not what was being discussed.
I don’t think it’s even meaningful to discuss creativity without acknowledging that it’s both subjective and that degrees may vary. And yes, problem solving is probably always creative to some degree. But the degree is the important part.
So, I wouldn’t call _them_ creative or not, because again I don’t think it’s a personality trait nor binary. Only the person doing it can tell how creative it feels. Personally I felt mostly uncreative when doing corporate work. I would have loved for it to feel creative, but it didn’t.
From what I gather the hatred for AI among musicians and artists is pretty universal. I can only speak for myself. but for me and the way that I draw and make music AI can only replace, never complement my creative process.
This is somewhat speculative, but as I see it, there are two ways to retain excellent people:
a) You pay them handsomely
b) You do shit they like, they way the like.
Sometimes it overlaps, of course. But this is essentially the reason why people stay in academia in the hard sciences. Most of us could earn considerably more in industry.
I'm not sure midjourney can compete with the bigwigs on a). But doing healthcare stuff is probably more fulfilling to the researchers, and with less "we stole from all the artists" vibes.
Of course, if this all works out, they might me able to do a) easily :)
Personally, I think the bigger problem is successful individuals and companies deciding to just stick with their original business model and squeeze every drop of money out of it for their own personal enrichment.
God forbid someone should try to do things to benefit society with their fortune.
This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.
My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!
Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.
On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!
MRI physicist here as well. I have a basic understanding of ultrasound, and this looks like an array of transducers organized to perform tomography, just as CT did for Xray.
However Ultrasound quality depends highly on transducer-skin contact.
Any physicists here to comment on the effects of sonar through liquid and the effects on image resolution and field of view?
This is precisely why you do it in water - the water-skin contact is effectively perfect, as is the water-transducer interface, and the body of water is easily characterizable; in effect you are scanning one large object that consists of a body of water that just happens to have a human body in it, and then extracting the body from that scan.
The water is a clever impedance matching trick. The contrast in density between air and human flesh is high, so the waves all reflect off the surface rather than penetrating and reflecting off the internal structures we care about.
That's why normally you're concerned with really good transducer contact (squeezing out any air) or use a gel to match impedance.
I'm a bit rusty on CT, but I'd guess the resolution is proportional to the total number of transducers in the array (e.g. larger sensing surface equals tighter resolution) since you're basically taking a Fourier transform of the incident wave.
Ultrasound researcher working on fast microvascular imaging here. Depends on the datarates, you can generally get pretty good blood flow data pretty fast, with <.5 seconds per slice if you do it with appropriate algorithms. A lot of this depends on motion though as you said, as the issue is generally getting a high-enough SNR (blood flow is generally 30-40 dB below tissue in energy, except for the biggest of vessels). Generally, higher frequencies have less of a separation between blood and tissue, but they have issue with attenuation. But I think with enough SNR (and with their element count that may indeed be possible), they could get pretty good blood flow data across the whole body.
I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive.
But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. But, at the same time, it is likely that it isn't a problem. And now, you will be stressed about the chance of having some health condition and spend time and money digging into a rabbit hole of what the issue could be, only to find out it was nothing.
They also don't say anything about the price of such a machine. If they really envision a future where everyone can easily get a scan, this is a crucial factor.
Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature?
I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.
Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication.
To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is that you'll see lots of lumps and bumps growing, and this could lead to lots of invasive checks. You can't not check because that's not fair "here is something that looks like cancer, if we grab it now it will stop you needing chemo. But it could just be a cyst."
So, its really really expensive to have 100k people getting monthly full body MRIs for 10+ years. Even more expensive to get them at the right resolution.
I think, that if these scanners are good and that is _Very much_ not proven. Then having a long term study would be good. I however have deep misgivings about how effective field array ultrasonic scans are, also safety.
I also do not trust midjourney, a company that exists through large scale copyright infringement to handle that data safely, ethically or in a way that would allow decent science to be done from it.
The entire point of this machine seems to be to do non-invasive scans that don't have the type of side effects that constant CT scans would have and which are vastly cheaper and easier to do than MRI so that you can collect longitudinal data on any/all individuals.
Finding "lumps and bumps" or incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI, maybe your doctor would want a follow up MRI as a closer look but if it seems likely benign they could easily recommend you to just keep scanning with this ultrasound machine and only get another MRI or biopsy if it seems to develop in a malignant way.
The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief when it comes to the development of new medical technology. Many groundbreaking devices were developed through the efforts of individuals, including the MRI.
> The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief
the full body MRI was developed in the NHS/university along with CT scanners. But let us not pretend that modern companies have been acting in a way that is ethical. OR that there exists a legal framework that fights for the rights of normal people.
> incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI
Biopsies are not risk free. General anaesthetic carries a risk. You'll be on antibiotics, the wound will have an infection risk. Also the build up of scar tissue is a real issue.
This is the ethical issue. Because suspicious lumps will need investigation, no ethics board is going to allow not investigating.
This also fucks up the data.
Its not impossible, but it needs sensible thought, thought from actual medical professionals, rather than a company who is at best operating in a legal grey zone.
We can and do full body scans. Typically in the context of research, or for focus/metastasis search in current clinical settings.
The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.
Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.
I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.
However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.
Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.
> we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently
So your take is we just do the testing and ignore it's outputs entirely, until something comes up? And that is somehow different and better than current imaging processes?
I understand the argument but imagine if it were applied to other nascent technologies like the microscope, which incidentally was also viewed with suspicion by doctors who (accurately) cited flaws in early models such as chromatic and spherical aberration. Thankfully, many people persisted in developing it including non-medical polymaths like Robert Hooke. I recognize this may cause some headaches for doctors dealing with insistent patients but I doubt it will be a permanent problem as the technology develops further and becomes more widespread.
I think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.
Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.
Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.
If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise.
And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors.
Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off.
I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.
You won’t know they are benign unless you plan on a biopsy or surgery for every finding. It’s exactly this reason why we only regularly scan people that have say, known cancer.
They'll know whether they're getting bigger or not. Pretty much the same for if you have a lump just under your skin that you can see and feel but this would allow you to see the ones further inside. So you just have to take the same attitude and advice towards them that a doctor would give you about the surface level lumps. What's the difference?
Just to add to this. My heart pumps blood in a known but different way than normal. I know because, to practice sports in my home country, it is required to undergo a specific checkup that includes an ECG. However, despite doing that visit many times, only two doctors ever mentioned this condition. The reason is that it causes no issue at all, so they just don't want to worry people for nothing by telling them their heart is pumping in a different way than most other people.
I would rather know that than have the information hidden from me. It's also not hard to imagine a scenario where such quirks are harmless on their own, but might be relevant in the future or for reasons the doctor is missing. I guess it's true some people would panic at any sort of quirk they find, but I find that frustrating as someone that doesn't think that way.
Further, as someone that has spent far too much time and money trying to find the root cause of a particular issue (with absurdly frustrating inefficiencies in terms of being bounced around, insurance nonsense, etc), I am generally in favor of improving our ability to find a lot of information in a manner like this. Doctors are generally good at finding very common issues they see all the time, much worse at anything uncommon. This can be a real problem. I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases, we might find a lot of issues that were hard to catch without that scale of information. I also think preemptive scanning would catch a lot of issues that go otherwise unnoticed for much longer than they should go, something that also happened to me, but is mostly an issue of systemic inefficiencies in our current healthcare system rather than something that this technology is required to solve. In my case, doing some simple checks that they felt weren't necessary because I seemed healthy would've caught it much earlier.
> I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases
Was this presented as an opportunity for researchers to be able to run more large scale studies involving full scans I woukd have a different take. This is however presented as a shiny toy to be put in a spa, that gives you images you don't know how to interpret anyway, or at best gives you some AI-powered report.
The rest that you're saying points more to issues of you country's Healthcare system, and it isn't clear if and how this technology would improve that.
Because a lot of things showing up in scans you wont know what is until you cut them out or do a biopsy. And even then you might never know if that thing would have progressed to become a problem. Scanning more will not solve that.
Overdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that.
Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.
Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.
I agree, hopefully it becomes just like any other cheap and easy measurement like blood pressure. Most of the time, small changes and variations will be determined to be normal but having a record and a measurement allows you to determine what is abnormal or a symptom of a disease. It's the difference between having a measurement and having nothing at all (if you never got a scan with CT or MRI).
If this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?
> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
We already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things.
Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?
“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.
Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.
MedLifeCrisis the youtube channel has a great video [1] on why you shouldn't full body scan. He's a consultant (highest level of doctor) in the NHS in England (and has done a PhD and research as is common in the UK medical system).
I learned this from watching House. I am certain that it's true, but I also kind of wonder how much backpressure there is against this kind of thing because the scanners are also insanely expensive to run per minute.
The backpressure on x-rays is because dosing yourself with radiation on a regular basis is a really great way to generate health problems in the course of trying to find some. There's a reason x-ray operators and anyone in the room with the patient get given lead lined aprons to wear while the machine is active.
"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook.
Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good.
I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.
I understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.
This is exactly why it's a bad idea. I agree that if this technology comes to fruition, it should be in every clinical and research setting as a tool for us to further our understanding.
It shouldn't be a commodified test anyone can do at any time they feel like it. There are so many examples this leading to over or misdiagnosing already. I've seen patients who thought they had diabetes because they got a CGM over the counter and it showed a blood sugar spike during exercise (as in, their body doing exactly what it was supposed to do). He also now avoids oatmeal because "it spikes my blood sugar". Surprise: reddit and tiktok are awash with such stories as well.
I've seen a patient who on a whim decided to get 24hr blood pressure monitoring done, and thought they have severe hypertension because their systolic reached 170 when they were climbing stairs and during a football match because they were cheering and shouting.
In a similar vein, there are shady practicians who offer full body MRI scans, and fMRI brain scans to the well-to-do as a way of diagnosing things, when in fact neither are specific enough to actually diagnose something on their own.
23andme tests sending patients into clinics because they found a specific SNP that may be associated with worse outcomes for a disease.
We have neither the resources nor a specific enough technology (scan shows something: not specific enough to tell us what it is, but it sure is something) to unleash these for the general population to use.
Understood; these are the failure modes of cheap, weak tests in a system designed for expensive, high signal tests. I get that it is causing a real pain when these are introduced willy-nilly -- so is there a way for the medical system to evolve into making productive use of such signals?
Because the status quo is not working for a lot of folks in managing their own health, and just saying "it has to be this way" --while every other aspect of their life takes advantage of a wider range of options -- leaves them careening into MAHA style crazyness .
SOTA ultrasound devices are still very expensive, with e.g. a custom 3D probe with a few hundred piezo elements costing well over 10k. IF they want to use MEMS probe instead of piezo (which is implied by them saying that they will use a chirp), that's going to be even more expensive, considering the lack of manufacturing know-how. When sufficiently scaled, I wouldn't say it is an exorbitant price for large research hospitals, but I am a little skeptical of rolling these out as a health checkup "spa" service outside of areas with extreme wealth concentration (e.g., Silicon Valley? Sure. London? Yeah; Minneapolis? not so sure.)
I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.
Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).
In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).
I'm grateful that modern science can monitor and predict such issues, even if in the end there's no problem. The alternative, as we know for thousands of years without modern health care, is far worse for women giving birth.
I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too heartbreaking.
Sure, but in this case, there was a good reason for the additional tests: a high-risk pregnancy. And still, the outcome was stress for nothing. Now, imagine thousands of perfectly healthy people doing full-body scans every week just because they can. This actually carries the risk of jamming real health care, because those perfectly healthy people will undergo additional clinical tests for nothing.
Imagine all the data that gets us towards those scans actually being meaningful. Don't treat them like scans to find problems but scans to learn from, collectively.
As I wrote in replies to other similar comments, this would be the case if this technology was presented as an opportunity for researchers to run more large-scale studies. This isn't however the case, it is instead presented as a shiny toy for fancy spas.
So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).
On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.
EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
The diameter of a carbon atom is 154 picometers. Nobody's going down into the femtos. And you're not going to get atomic resolution, either, because humans move around too much and things like scanning electron microscopes need very stationary samples. Even microscopic vibrations can blur the final image.
Which isn't to say that you couldn't get very good resolution...
Just for illustration: Gravitational wave detection is on the femtometer scale. The proton is about that size. We can measure these things, but the machines are, let's say, "big".
LIGO detects length changes of 10^-18 m, or attometers, not femtometers, which are a thousand times longer. (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts) But this does not matter at all, because this is not resolution of the body image, but the size of the vibration on the speaker. That's a technical data point that I don't see any reason to include in this presentation other than to cause this exact confusion.
The video looks in general like it's trying to impress by giving a lot of incidental information about how the device works while being very light on what it would be able to actually see -- e.g., it doesn't matter how many gigabytes your device collects if the resulting image is blurry.
Compare the website of LIGO (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts), which also has a lot about the technical marvels (huge vacuum tubes! precision engineering!) but crucially includes the goal of this all.
"I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in <1 minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine."
I can't see how ultrasonic tomography can actually get anywhere near the resolution or penetrative depth that MRI can have.
Also The other thing I am unsure of is what the health effect of dumping you into an industrial scale ultrasonic cleaner. For example you can have doppler to measure blood flow in real time, but you can't do that for early pregnancy because of some health reason or other.
I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit.
Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of the Theranos hysteria.
The authors report explicitly state that the system's resolution does not match clinical CT or MRI. The elevational resolution is 15–25mm, meaning each slice is effectively a thick 2D section rather than the fine isotropic 3D volume MRI provides. MRI also delivers far richer soft-tissue contrast; this device produces only three contrast types (reflectivity, speed of sound, attenuation), and because it uses a low 1MHz frequency, the reflection images come primarily from tissue boundaries rather than from internal tissue texture.
I could see this being valuable for adipose tissue mapping or fatty-liver monitoring at a large scale, as the machines would be significantly cheaper, but this isn't some revolutionary magic bullet like the Twitter post is insinuating.
As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.
For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip.
Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passive, as in MR elastography (most common), where the patient wears a transducer pad, and vibration is actively generated by a driver. You've then got algorithmically-passive, which is more analogue to passive sonar, reconstructing tissue stiffness from ambient broadband vibration without the emitted probing pulse, but that is very much entirely academic. I guess the question would be, why is it worth pursuing when you have something like optical coherence elastography (OCE) for non-invasive profiling. Doing it using noisy ultrasound method becomes redundant. There are other methods, but the outcome is the same.
Generally (this is true for all systems, not just humans) you need to induce energy into it to more effectively measure it's output. Think of it like a bell - if I want to hear the note it produces, it's much easier to hear what this is if I ring it with a hammer. Granted, it will be "passively" resonating to a point where, with a sensitive enough sensor, I could probably pick up the output without the hammer - but that is a pointless problem to solve. I could hit a bell with a soft hammer a million times over without causing damage to it. The lifetime of the person hitting it with a hammer is far shorter than the accumulative damage to the bell before it breaks. The same is true for humans. You could effectively run a very low-energy, 60Hz vibration through a person (which is how the pads work) for multiple lifetimes before it would cause significant damage, so there comes little point in solving that problem. As such, true "passive" imaging is functionally pointless if your outcome is "safely image a patient". You're overengineering your solution to solve a problem that is only relevant if your patient was planning on living for 1000+ years.
I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.
The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.
My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.
LNT is the null hypothesis. No one disagrees a linear model fits the data very well in high doses. If you want to argue that model doesn't work in low doses, you need a model with more parameters and sufficient data to fit it. The issue is that, at these low doses we want to differentiate, we're also looking at effect sizes that are hard to separate from noise, and sampling biases that are hard to erase. There's still lively and ongoing debate.
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place (https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry...).
The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
>Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
I don't think "someone used their tool to produce a silly result and used it" qualifies as Midjourney having questionable history at all.
From my understanding of the post, the waves that are created are smaller than light waves, and there's no evidence that light waves, sound waves or sub-sonic waves have any aneurysm-causing effects.
(I researched more and found in the video a value)
The waves are 50 nanometres, and this is basically the equivalent of having a full body ultrasound. We've been doing baby ultrasounds for decades with no ill effects, so I can't imagine this being different
Before ultrasound, they used to x-ray pregnant women to see the fetus. At that time, someone might have said "one would hope this has been studied"... unfortunately that practice went on for about 60 years before being stopped in the late 1950s.
Side note: kinda crazy they had medical x-rays in the 1890s. X-Ray imaging was discovered in 1985 and used clinically within 2 years.
But I do agree with your point, these days, I hope we're better about studying the potential dangers of current technologies we use.
We also put lead in paint and gas because why the fuck not? Asbestos pretty much everywhere because it was a miracle material, etc. for decades, and we're still paying the price
> But I do agree with your point, these days, I hope we're better about studying the potential dangers of current technologies we use.
Sorry, but this is just pure "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" vibe to me. I mean, you've just brought up a perfect example yourself! What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to still hope that this time it's not like that?
I don't wanna start the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing and whatnot, and surely you shouldn't avoid ultrasound just because of irrational fear of some yet undiscovered side-effects, but it's really amazing, how people tell fun stories about how common was the narrative about major war being very unlikely in "modern days" (because who would dare to do that with this kind of technology!) right before WW1, and then conclude with firmly believing that these days (after WW2) it sure won't happen, because humans are not that dumb. And my point is, that perhaps it indeed might have been a bit less likely, if people didn't believe that it is so unlikely to keep stepping on the same rake.
Could you expand on the term "working"? Do you mean like "working to slowly lower a person into water while videos of animated Figma UIs play back on a monitor?" Or do you mean some crazy kind of "working", like "the ring of devices we see are scanning the organs of the woman we see and the images appearing on the monitor are those just-captured organ scans?"
The first video appears to be real. Who knows if it's a working prototype or just a mockup, but the fact that it's held together by C-clamps and other stuff you could get at Home Depot makes me lean towards the former. If it was purely for marketing they'd probably make it look more polished.
> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop.
You have to hire an army of expensive compliance people (cheap ones aren't nimble enough for startups), develop the whole thing start to finish under strict design controls, and usually throw a lot of time and capital into convincing regulators your very innovative and disruptive new R&D endeavor is actually derivative enough to draft behind some existing medical device.
For reference, OP is talking about the 510(k) process. One of the issues with that process is that an approved medical device may end up with a whole tree of "derivative" devices approved through the 510(k) process. If that original device is then found to have problems and has its approval removed, those derivative devices do not also become unapproved.
do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong
this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today
You can't have any impact at all if you can't legally operate it or if you are hamstrung in your marketing claims.
Chatgpt is just words. This is an ultrasound imaging system. Who knows what could go wrong: blown out eardrums from feedback, acoustic burns, wild inaccuracies that lead to misdiagnosis.
There's really no way around documentation as a way of collecting evidence that the team knows what they are doing. Things like enumerating all the possible patient risks, assessing their severity, updating the design to mitigate, and ultimately testing that it works as intended.
This is why you can't just bolt on the medical device part. Most devs will have a conniption if suddenly expected to attend lots of meetings and do a lot of paperwork. Different skillset and very expensive to switch out your whole workforce.
Let's say you do a diagnostic based on the results of this machine. Later, patient suits and you have to answer for your diagnostic. If the only evidence for your diagnostic is coming from a non-FDA approved machine, you're liable.
It needs approval from someone to ensure it's safe first and foremost - health & safety inspections, hygiene, FCC approval, etc.
And FDA approval (I presume) if they want to give formal diagnoses, but I believe that if they don't get that it'll fall under the "alternative medicine" umbrella, which is very broad. But they can do whatever under that umbrella as long as it's safe.
I wonder how doctors feel about people consulting ChatGPT. I know a doctor who can't stand people getting medical advice from quacks on TikTok, but that's probably a different problem/pattern
It sounds like they are trying to fly under the FDA thresholds for regulation as a medical device and be considered a low risk "wellness device" which makes no medical diagnostic claims and has low risk. This is why it is in spas and not doctor's offices.
> FDA may consider certain products that use non-invasive sensing (e.g. optical sensing) to
estimate, infer, or output physiologic parameters (e.g. blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood
glucose, heart rate variability) to be general wellness products when such outputs are intended
solely for wellness uses, and provided they:
• are non-invasive and not-implanted;
• do not involve an intervention or technology that may pose a risk to the safety of users
or other persons if specific regulatory controls are not applied;
• are not intended for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, prevention, or treatment of a
disease or condition;
• are not intended to substitute for an FDA-authorized, cleared, or approved device;
• do not include claims, functionality, or outputs that prompt or guide specific clinical
action or medical management; and
• do not include values that mimic those used clinically unless validated (e.g.
manufacturer testing, peer-reviewed clinical literature) to reflect those values
This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.
It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.
More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.
Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.
This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.
> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.
What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.
The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.
So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk
The false positive rate is the entire risk.
When you go to the doctor for a physical they don't run all of the blood tests they can. They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
Some tests have been removed from routine exams, or at least discouraged, because they were producing more false positives and harm than what they were saving.
Full body scans are deep on the end of the spectrum of tests with high false positive rate when ordered without supporting symptoms. That's the risk.
> People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
Not really how it works in real life. When you get a full body scan, especially with ultrasound, there are a lot of benign things that can show up that vaguely look like non-benign things. Even if the interpretation is "probably nothing", many people start worrying and think they need to get more tests just to be safe. Even people who don't see themselves as "armchair physician" will start thinking that they should at least rule out the worst case because they wouldn't want to die of cancer having known that something might have been there.
They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
True to some extent, but you're ignoring the role that costs and insurance play here. Do you really think the personal physicians of billionaires and heads of state are only running a limited set of blood work because they're worried about false positives?
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
More often it leads to people thinking they have issues when they don't.
The same thing happens with blood tests: You can order all the blood tests you want if you're willing to pay for them. If you order enough, you will get some that show up as abnormal. You can start spending tens of thousands of dollars ruling things out and never catch any real issues.
I’d want to see the data, and even if you had 10x the rate of false positives (to true positives) that resulted in unnecessary tests and procedures, it still could be worth it, depending on the severity of what you avoided with the testing.
I actually don't think we have the data available that I want, and even if we do, as many others here have pointed out, intentionally sticking our heads in the sand forever makes no sense.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
Many countries with far better outcomes don’t do this, is it necessary, or is it just the product of an insurance-driven health industry which prioritises interventions over health?
Maybe there is a bias for action within our moral and legal system. Fundamentally if you can deal with uncertainty correctly or "perfectly" wouldn't more information always be better?
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
Isn't the way we decide what justifies intervention by comparing observational data, action and outcomes? Currently our observations are limited by many things including the cost and side effects. More frequent or better observations will improve the assessment of what justifies interventions.
That sounds more like a capitalism issue, to be honest. Treatment = revenue, so of course there will be unscrupulous individuals who will bend their oath and let patient anxiety drive care.
The trick seems like it would be to strongly incentivize waiting and watching any symptomless anomalies if further investigation is invasive. If you're getting 60 second scans every month then something growing will be catchable and something static or that disappears can be ignored until the next scan.
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
No one is saying that we should stop looking. Especially not the commenter you replied to. They're saying the tech Midjourney presented isn't _gud_ enough to justify frequent scanning.
Consider the null space of diagnostic markers, say, the precise shape of a tissue boundary used in early cancer diagnoses that comes out blurry in an imaging system every time. More scans with the same null space will not resolve the null space.
> This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
Exactly this. I mean, even if the scan is really indeterminate, at a minimum you can simply wait, then scan again. If it's truly something serious, it will become determinate at some point. Doing this is still better than nothing and carries no risks of unnecessary procedures.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
This. The solution to all these "but what about spurious results" arguments is pretty obvious: Wait for some time, scan again, compare the results. We currently can't do this only because the required frequent scans are not cheap enough to do it en masse, so the scanning demands for masses of spurious results would overwhelm the system. Once cheap scanning (and actually good AI interpretation) becomes ubiquitous, this ceases to be an issue.
I love how people wait for some kind of technological God or magic silver bullet to """cure""" them, but when it comes to eating clean, exercising, not sitting 8 hours in front of a fucking screen every single day, getting good sleep, and all the other low hanging fruits you can act on right now, it's radio silence even though it would solves the majority of health issues
> ... It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light.
> ... Together they act as both a choir and an audience
I think I'm not the target audience.
I guess they are going to need to sign up a lot of people, to train on their scans + their medical outcomes. So the article is talking to people who will get enthused by it, which is more difficult after the question of 23AndMe data sale.
I’m a weirdo who vaguely enjoys my MRIs. I’m moderately claustrophobic, but they still don’t really bother me. And I love the warming feeling that makes me feel like I’m getting microwaved.
You can definitely feel it in your body, I mean you have metals in you. I definitely feel tingling and general sense of something nearly touching my skin and insides.
My understanding was that your body was absorbing some amount of whatever electromagnetic stuff passes through you for the image. And the techs have told me it’s nothing to worry about.
I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors).
With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).
This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.
I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").
It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.
I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.
Exactly - I had switched to a one meal per day setup and have been mostly following it for a few years.
Then after a routine “heart health” check all my indicators were super out of whack - the doctors thought I was on my deathbed - but I am perfectly happy pain free, in shape, physically active person…
Then _i myself_ had to dig into all these tests and figure out that they were measuring the wrong thing - since they try to time where your body is “just about to eat after a fast” - normally for most people in the morning before breakfast, but since my first meal of the day is usually around 20:00 - my body had adopted to have higher levels of various things just to stay on top of my lifestyle choices.
Anyway I had to educate some doctors since they haven’t really had a case like mine, so they weren’t thinking critically of how to interpret the results…
I imagine an automated test _could_ take these things into account with large enough dataset, but it would need to do a lot more reasoning than statistical correlation.
I do believe current sota models should be good enough to come to the correct conclusions with the right harness though.
Reminds me that a few years ago my wifes grandfather (80+) was wondering if he should cut back on the amount of exercise he was doing. He would regularly be knocking on our door at 6am to see if one of us would want to got for a quick 10k run or to hit the gym.
He was a firefighter in NY in his youth and had never stopped exercising even after retirement.
He went to his GP explained his workout routine and was basically told there is no precedent for it as people his age tend to not be running 10km a day. In short he was told if you're not in pain or fatigued keep at it.
I think he's nearly 90 now and has cut back the running to only a day or so a week, but last time we went to visit he was in his garage bench pressing 50kg
Sorry to branch out:
How does this one meal per day work for you? There is recommended calories for a person, do you have to follow it somehow to make sure you have enough energy and exercise?
I just eat double portion at dinner, and then nibble on snacks before bed - I haven’t had breakfast in decades, then since I moved to India, with the carby nature of the food it was hard to stay in shape with 2 meals, so I decided to try and skip the lunch too. With fun work it is actually quite easy, and babysitting 4 claudes and helping out colleagues is very entertaining.
Now I either do gym before dinner (heavy exercise) or social dance after.
I’ve been given a lot of advice how I “should” be structuring it - like “don’t eat too much before bed” or “never eat before exercise” … but I haven’t had any issues with what I’m doing so far (~2 years)
If the current state is anything to go by, an automated test would not only flag your out of distribution results but try to gaslight everyone reading its output with additional false indicators to map you into an area that's in distribution. Statistical models cannot accept the existence of extremely rare edge cases.
Maybe something that isn't completely censored anecdata? At best these fall into "well known diseases with obvious symptoms that overworked, incompetent, or simply sexist, human doctors missed" and not actual rare cases.
> Modern LLMs routinely beat human doctors at diagnosing "extremely rare edge cases".
There is a selection bias here. Not saying it wouldn’t work, but right now you hear about exceptional cases, not when the LLM wants to amputate for a wart.
We all work with LLMs, right? It hasn’t been long at all since an LLM gaslit me while attempting to recover an unbootable laptop. I should have been recommended a few simple steps to try; instead, it was unable to ignore the irrelevant details and led me on an hours-long chase. To me that means the LLM will also struggle to ignore irrelevant medical information.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
There are numerous comments here from experienced people addressing this. Yes, that happens and a doctor who dismisses the concern can be sued for malpractice if something actually does show up, so they are put in a difficult position. For some reason you just assume that doctors will recommend against an invasive procedure when there is a positive tomography result.
Review the numerous comments that address this as a statistical issue -- which it very much is when talking about the scale that Midjourney is claiming.
It's worse then that unfortunately. Even when invasive tests are positive, and we think we caught a cancer early, we know from population statistics that the reality is that often nothing would have happened. So we don't even truly know how to tell a cancer that will kill you from one won't. And we don't really know what it is that we don't know.
This is more true for some cancers then other though. Prostate, breast, and maybe melanoma are the worst in this regard. This is why prostate and breast cancer screening programmes are controversial, although the needle is swinging towards them being more useful as surgeries and treatments get better. Some other cancers like pancreatic cancer will always kill you eventually, so it's always good to catch them. It's a nuanced problem.
This whole issue is called "overdiagnosis", and personally I used to be obsessed with it. Being aware of it mostly caused a lot of hand wringing and grief, it's just easier to believe that every cancer you catch is a good thing. However, one of the broader issues is that we will never know what we don't know if we don't look. So there exists another perspective that all the suffering caused by overdiagnosis will eventually pay off in the long term. This is the "collect all the data for science/AI" perspective, and I've personally tentatively adopted it myself, although perhaps that's just because it's nicer to believe that you do some good even when you do harm. I think it's more likely that [novel cancer therapies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7) will solve the "harm" part of treatment before we solve overdiagnosis.
The reality is that important breakthroughs are often entirely unrelated to the data for you are collecting, and even worse that possibly helpful data is locked away due to regulation and never used. This is kinda why I've come to make some kind of peace with private clinics scamming people with whole body MRIs, as I'm sure they're secretly selling the data which might lead to some good. However, they would probably do even more good if they didn't exist so they didn't jack up the prices for MRI machines by inflating demand. The marketing they do is the most morally reprehensible part of the whole deal, as it's usually just lying and creating health anxiety for profit. The fact that midjourney here is marketing themselves in this direction is giving me some serious Theranos vibes. Quick and cheap MRI equivalents would be really useful in the clinic, and it would have to spend a few decades there to prove it is useful before moving on to the "spa" stage. That they are trying to market a render of an idea directly to the wellness crowd firmly puts this in the "scam" folder for me. The fact that midjourney is mostly irrelevant now also fits well with this, making it likely that this is either a marketing stunt or a desperate pivot to get funded. Hopefully there are not that many suckers who will put their VC money down on this loosing bet.
Maybe it would end up fine “in the long run” but you cannot ignore the significant issues arising at the beginning (and at each release of a more performant tool): what do you do if you find something that “shouldn't be there".
That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say “in the long run” the problem comes in the meantime (and no, I don't think people in the present should endure bad things because it's going to make the future better).
Overdiagnosis will be a major problem long after we have the data.
It's just hard convince people with a general feeling something's wrong and a specific picture of something wrong that the two are almost certainly unconnected.
MRIs by themselves no, but depending on what you want to actually see you need to inject a contrast agent which is probably not something you want to do too frequently.
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.
The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.
Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety
You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it
Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket
Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.
MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities.
MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them.
So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two.
What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI?
Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.
Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans.
I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.
The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session.
TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".
As others are saying in these comments, MRI machines themselves aren't particularly expensive machines on a per-scan basis, to the extent the machines themselves are often left underutilised.
But even if you disregard that, there's this:
It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.
The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.
You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done.
Other than the structure reading like an AI wrote it, the content also reads like someone who believes in homeopathy and invested in Juicero wrote it. Or hyperloop, where a believer could say paraphrase you and say "Conventional [trains] are already cheap. Why can't a [fast train in a vacuum tube] be cheap too?".
Note this does not mean I think the hardware proposed here is totally impossible*. Sure you could make an ultrasound scanner. Why not? But then, hyperloop was always physically possible, just never turned out to be a good idea to actually build**.
* That said, I am suspicious about the claim in the video "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom - not micrometers or nanometers but picometers!", which does sound impossible to me given the movement of atoms is the sense field itself, albeit I'm not an expert in this domain and may just be wrong like how there's weird tricks for photolithography smaller than the wavelength of light used.
** Back when hyperloop was taken seriously and I was still looking for genius behind things Musk said, I thought hyperloop was an excuse to develop here on Earth a transport system that for a Mars colony made more sense than cars and roads (and indeed I still think that, just there's no evidence Musk ever did).
That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!
It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A).
You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored.
We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.
It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value.
The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated.
ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.
> Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.
My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality!
There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.
This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace.
This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions.
The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris.
We all can see where that leads
> every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan
Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?
* Some kind of scans, like CT scans, use ionizing radiation and should not be done too often.
* Looking at only imaging scans it is often impossible to tell apart a cancer and a benign growth. (More invasive tests would still be required, which was what the parent posters were warning about)
I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.
It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.
One obvious alternative plan, presupposing that Full Body Scan is dirt cheap, is the following protocol:
- At 25 years old or whatever you get a FBS. Pretty much no matter what, this FBS will not be used to do more checks, procedures, and so on.
- ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.
There's still an issue with needless procedures, but the amount of 'weirdness that are not going to cause an actual issue had the patient never been aware' is significantly reduced by looking only at changes. i.e. most 'weirdness' shows up early and is fairly stable.
The difficulty is the moral issue. You cannot show that first scan to the patient. Even if every soul agrees beforehand that the rule is that nothing on that first scan, no matter how scary it looks, is further investigated... any medical issues raised by patients are used as a major information input for diagnosing issues. If I show a patient a scan that has this tumor looking thing on the left lung, then no doubt a few months later they'll be back complaining about shortness of breath and a pain on the left side of the torso. The mind is a powerful thing. At that point you can do a scan and see... the same nasty tumor looking thing we saw on that first FSB, and we're right back to the issue of these scans doing more harm than good.
Is it morally acceptable to hide that first scan from the patient?
I think the issue with this and the proposed ‘spa’ scan model is that the diffs are usually meaningless. We all have cysts, masses, and weird shapes that shift around and show up on imaging. Many of these shapes require biopsy to determine what they are. Without symptoms the false positive rate is ridiculously high.
Modern medicine sort of requires us to suspend the idea that we can know everything happening in our body at any given time. If we could develop a diagnostic technique to instantly determine if shapes in our bodies are malignant or benign something like frequent full body scans could be interesting, but they really just introduce noise right now.
You gloom on one aspect, the smell. OP focuses instead on full body scans themselves, and the irrelevant issues with everyone's bodies they would highlight.
The question is: If you have enough full body scans of many healthy people, and the statistical tools to model it (beyond "this range is OK"), whether this would reduce these false alarms to an acceptable level.
The real crux of it remains though: Let's say it finds something that increases your death risk by x=0.1%. Could you sleep? I'm not sure. Let's say the operation has 2x=0.2% risk. What do you do? What value of x makes this a problem for you?
You're absolutely right, and I share the frustration.
I'm thinking a possible solution to this signal-to-noise problem is to embrace the longitudinal view: instead of comparing each scan with the normal across the population compare only against past self, unless there's a risk factor that warrants it.
This way we could presumably make use of plentiful scan data and mostly look at the stuff that evolves in suspicious ways, not what looks suspicious.
This always feels like a thinly veiled excuse to ration healthcare. Would these same doctors refuse a full body MRI to a billionaire paying out of pocket?
Anything found can be monitored with focused follow up scans. It doesn't have to be immediately biopsied if it's in a location where that would pose a risk of iatrogenic harm.
I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.
There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.
More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.
It's obviously a lie to get us to accept no tests due to limited machines. The same as when COVID started masks "didn't help" because they didn't yet secure enough supply for everyone, then when they did, suddenly the masks helped.
Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less. Our bodies are not special.
It's also ridiculous that the proposition goes like:
1. Doctor knows some tests will flag tumors or variations that look weird and that we shouldn't then go investigate all of them
2. Doctor shuts off their brain and will then investigate all of them by doing invasive procedures
Just knowing how many such variations there are and if they grow or not is useful information. But the doctors pretend like they are super smart before the test and super dumb right after.
This kind of thinking (that it’s an obvious lie, perpetrated by a cabal) is the sort of superstitious bullshit that is going to jet us all killed. Look up Bayes theorem. As yourself how good a test would have to be if the base rate is low. Wonder what the probability of harm might be if the next advised test was invasive and the patients was anxious because a lump had been detected.
You should read til the end! No cabal, just stupidity and believing other people are stupid instead of telling them the truth and expecting them to act smart based on the information.
Ask yourself, do you think billionnaires have yearly MRIs or that they wait for later because the doctor and themselves will be anxious? It's an argument that treats regular people as stupid.
First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability.
If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable.
Also, it’s quite likely that billionaires are having lots of unnecessary procedures and that harm is being caused. The mri scans are not the reason they live longer!
Ok but now the argument shifted from "More MRI = bad" to "More MRI = okay as long as doctors do a good job and have enough time". I agree with that. My point was just that it's possible to get to a point where everyone having yearly MRIs is doable because the issue isn't with more information in itself, it's with doctors not having enough time for the patient.
It's not the same doctors saying they themselves are simultaneously smart and stupid. It's "smart" doctors saying that as a point of policy, it is not a good idea for biomedical companies to try to make a buck off of popularizing unnecessary diagnostics, because anxious patients will by chance or by intention find a "dumb" doctor who will agree to perform invasive procedures. (Have you ever heard a tech person say that the tech world has a lot of stupid ideas? It's the same thing.) Look up what happened with South Korea diagnosis vs. mortality rates when they instituted national thyroid screenings in the 90s.
> Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less.
With perfect humans in a perfect society, maybe. But such is ignoring the elephants in the room here, from the actual experts on the topic.
So do you think the doctors should hide the data from you so you don’t know anything looks weird, or tell you it looks weird but they don’t think it’s worth investigating it? And do you think the average patient will say “ok that’s fine, I’m not getting a second opinion and if I die my family will sue you into the grave too”?
I believe doctors should tell you the truth and not assume you will do things later that are detrimental with the information as that has a lot of bad consequences.
Case in point, doing that during COVID I think amplified the wave of antivaxxers and medical denialists. Which itself had in my opinion a way worse effect on global health than almost anything else recently because now you have to convince a number of people to trust the medical system again.
It's not far off what a decent health care system is able to provide in most wealthy countries. It's even somewhat lower actually.
It's difficult to assess the risk factors, but in the end, I have the feeling their additional medical staff and their ability to "cut the queue" (S. Jobs-style) just barely offsets the additional common risk factors (stress, long hours, segregated life), specially if we compare to the upper-middle class.
In the end, there is no magic $100M pill giving you 10 more years. And in truth, access to food, drinking water, a non-toxic environment and really basic healthcare & medicine (vaccines, antibiotics) probably already brings you at a fairly high life expectancy.
There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.
When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.
Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.
So you are certainly correct but you can also tighten up your definitions for true positives as you have more information on your false positives. There may exist additional signal as well.
To your point though I think there is a difference between collecting and evaluating additional data sources and using them as diagnostic tools.
I suppose I fundamentally disagree with the implication of your post that there is no value in gathering further data for these reasons, it would seem to suggest we’re already diagnostically optimal and could not do better with additional signal.
Positive for what, exactly? Quoting convnet, above:
> The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Also, overdependency on "spas" for health information could lead to an atrophy of other sorts of medical information gathering and diagnosis. e.g., there's no mention in the dreamy description of this spa experience of getting a blood draw or a patellar reflex test.
The root comment is talking about adding blood, breath, urin, spit... analysis. For body imaging only I agree with you. But if we add all this, I guess we'd be able to rule out many false positives
Your "guess" is not merely incorrect but logically invalid ... such added tests (which ex hypothesi are all negative) have no bearing on false positives from tomography.
I heard the same argument from my doctor when I wanted a blood scan.
But what's the intention? If you do a scan and then try to find everything that is wrong about you, you're 100% right, there will be false positives and unnecessary panic/medication etc.
However if you just collect data for months and years and WHEN you get a symptom you have a lot more data then we should be able to give better diagnosis faster. If we do that for long enough as humanity and there is data sharing the accuracy of the whole thing will increase a lot.
I think it's (at least partly) about the psychological impact of finding something unusual. Even if you know that it's probably nothing and understand the Bayes theorem, there will be a "what if" that might be strong enough to do actual harm (nocebo effect).
Compare: The placebo effect works (at a reduced rate) even if you tell people they're getting a placebo!
That's precisely where medicine is headed: personalized medicine.
You [hopefully] won't have to become a rare missed diagnosis because you didn't fit the demographic for this or that screening test.
Cost of genomic analysis is exponentially decreasing, and so much progress is happening so quickly.
Consider for example how in cardiology we advanced from ASCVD's 10-yr prognosis, to the PREVENT 30-yr prognosis. And still most providers are using the ASCVD score for their patients.
You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.
The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.
A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.
You're right. I wrote a bad response at midnight. I meant to say something more narrow and specific: genomic assessments and new biomarker tests will become affordable and add information.
For example, single nucleotide polymorphisms. This way doctors spend less time guessing which medication is likely to work best for you when there are many options available.
If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless.
I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.
They kind of are. Spain doesn't have yearly physicals, and during a GP visit, they don't even take your blood pressure. Blood tests are extremely uncommon, unlike in British medicine, where they take your blood pressure every time and blood tests are so prevalent people usually request one from time to time despite having no symptoms.
Spain's example showed the above (or the lack of) doesn't increase all-cause mortality and even excelling in longevity statistics.
https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/a01_0455.html
This japanese article found "No clear-cut evidence exists to determine whether undergoing health checks leads to greater longevity and/or lower medical expenditures."
And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.
This is why you have multiple successive panels. If there's a disease that happens for 1 in 10k people, and you have a test with 1% FPR, 99 of 100 people will be false positive.
But what you can do then, is either run a more expensive, elaborate test or one that's proven to be statistically independent on the positive testing population.
FPR can even be a good thing. Let's say you have an expensive test with a very low false positive rate. Then you can mix together 100 samples, and get a test with a much worse FPR 100 times cheaper. Then you can repeat the same individually on the positive population.
This is fully automatic and you don't even think about it. Btw, this is why mass testing, and public healthcare can be better. You can amortize the cost of things across a large number of people for no disadvantage.
You've got that completely backwards. Correctly applying Bayes' theorem, if an anomaly is observed you incorporate the prior into the calculation of the posterior probability. You don't just give up and say "the prior is miniscule so the likelihood is useless".
And then, even that's not enough. Decision theory needs to be applied to decide what action to take. That means taking into account the expected QALYs, cost and inconvenience across the distribution of possible outcomes. There's a whole spectrum of possible decisions, from immediately performing surgery, performing an invasive test like a biopsy, performing other less invasive tests, scheduling a follow-up non-invasive test at a later date, or just following a regular schedule of non-invasive tests and looking for any evolution along a longer time period.
The real problem is the binary thinking of either "we think you have X" and therefore tests must be performed or "we think you don't have X" and therefore tests shouldn't be performed. If medical organizations adopted empirically grounded decision frameworks, by applying them consistently doctors would be able to see something anomalous, assess that the risk isn't high enough to warrant immediate investigation, and be protected from a lawsuit in the unlikely case it was, in fact, something. And then we could do away with this "if we look we might find something" nonsense, which is pure fallacy.
The argument has some merits, but we should remember that, from the point of view of Bayes, you could apply the same argument to symptoms, which is only evidence. High odds of a false positive, means that you have not enough evidence, not that you have not useful information.
No you can't. Statistical tests assume independent data points. Testing the same individual repeatedly would be pseudoreplication, leading to wrong conclusions.
If you mean run different tests, where you collect different kinds of data from the same individual, sure but that's not something you can "just do" in the general case.
Medicine is not a statistical field. I've seen many times doctors dismissing someone "you're young, you can't have X". Although there is some truth in what you're saying: full body CT scans are on the rise now.
Hypertension is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause stroke, heart attack, or organ damage through long-term vessel strain, by which time damage may be irreversible; detecting it on time can prevent this with lifestyle changes and medication.
Diabetes is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause damage to blood vessels, nerves, kidneys, and eyes through chronic high blood sugar, by which time complications may be advanced; detecting it on time can prevent or delay this with treatment and lifestyle changes.
Hyperlipidemia is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause artery blockage through cholesterol buildup, by which time heart attack or stroke may occur; detecting it on time can prevent this with diet and medication.
Kidney disease is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause kidney failure through gradual loss of function, by which time dialysis may be needed; detecting it on time can slow progression.
Glaucoma is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause irreversible vision loss through optic nerve damage, by which time blindness may be permanent; detecting it on time can preserve vision.
At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office takes it wrong, even cardiologists, amazingly).
On the other end of the spectrum, what doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola. The prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.
Most diseases are in between and have to be evaluated case by case, not buckshot.
You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.
> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).
I mostly agree with you by one small wrinkle is that the evaluation of screening is normally against a criteria of cost effectiveness as well as safety. So for some conditions, if cost effectiveness was the barrier to rollout it might still be worth it if you are rich?
The decision as to whether mass screening is justified or not is complex, and varies a lot by test/condition/population etc. Luckily there are lots of smart people whose job it is to do these caclulations.
In your list, 1-4 are common enough, the tests are accurate enough, the costs of intervention are low enough and the benefits of early intervention are high enough to justify screening, which is why they do generally screen for them at least in hgiher risk groups. The other two are more mixed, which is why mass screening is less common.
All the evidence for full body scans is that they are not justified for asymptomatic people. The false positives are high, the costs of these false positives are high, and the imporved outcomes are too low to justify them. If you want one, go ahead, but realise that almost anything it finds is likely to be false either positive or not likely to ever cause a problem, and you'd have to deal with the worry and invasive tests and even surgery in aid of something that may never cause any trouble.
Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.
The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.
There is this infamous DANCAVAS study [1] in which they ran cardiovascular screening on older population and found absolutely no benefit in doing so. Note that while the linked study claims there was a benefit to screening (reduced mortality in men aged 65-69), the apparent effect was caused by improper statistics (primary endpoint did not show benefit, only subgroup analysis, which however lacked statistical power to be reliable). And indeed, their follow up study showed that there was no benefit in the subgroup. [2]
Many a dollar is wasted every year on trying to prove population-wide screening prevents mortality or increases patients’ quality of life and every time we don’t cheat with statistics we get the same answer - population-wide screening isn’t effective.
There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.
This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.
Other tests should be solved too (fecal/urine/blood). Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.
We already have patients trying to track their own health over longer time which is great. We then just have to make AI good enough to spot warning signs (without patients asking). Or parhaps we need to make those tests easy and cheap and regular.
> Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.
In general yes, just that "more" is monstrously massive to the point of it being closer to science fiction than reality, IMO.
To reiterate, various assays fluctuate rather wildly over the course of various body cycles. The reason(-s) your doctor should remind to get a blood drawn in the morning after a period of fasting is that the sample is taken at a somewhat steady state and the result is comparable to reference values without too much of a margin.
Anyone with a requirement to manage blood glucose levels will tell you that CGMs are vastly superior to finger pricks first and foremost due to the sample rate available and comfort reasons secondarily. With a finger prick test the patient is only somewhat aware where in the curve they are, which makes the test only a rough estimate due to this temporal error margin. A lot of people do not zero in their readings with finger pricks as they are mostly interested in the deltas.
Suppose you manage to make urine sampling relatively accurate and super cheap (e.g. tens of eurodollars per analyzer or cents per test strip) so you can have poorly-supervised, long-term studies with huge cohorts. However, unless you somehow control for sample collection conditions, all this baseline variability suddenly infects your whole dataset and effectively raises noise floor. It's not unreasonable to expect that whatever was found to be a useful signal under controlled conditions to fall below noise floor under uncontrolled conditions.
That's basically THE problem with the hypothetical test-it-all machine. Again, maybe in some cases that could be extremely useful, but in a lot of cases that would be counter productive. However, what CGMs hint us at is that various kinds of Continuous X Monitors could provide insights into body reactions to things, which is, currently, effectively not a signal in general medicine. Once the test-it-all machine is reframed as an array of continuous monitors and the useful signal is reframed from long-term drifts to short-term deltas it may unlock some additional diagnostic pathways.
I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode about the negative impact of full, generalized body scans on a patient's wellbeing decades ago.
The medical industry should NOT be paternalistic towards patients. People have a right to decide for themselves and be treated as adults capable of informed consent. Thankfully that model is starting to change, although there is much inertia.
Any test that is approved for use would have a better-than-random outcome distribution. Preconditioned on that, a test result is still useful no matter how uncertain. It is never the case that more information leaves you in a worse position.
I have personal experience here:
Every year I have elected to have ultrasounds done of my major internal organs. In the past two visits, the technicians spotted multiple developing growths in my liver and now kidneys. These are very likely to be benign cysts, but one piece of blood work that could be a marker for cancer is inconclusive. The odds are still high that this is totally benign and will either clear up on its own, or at least stop growing and cause no further issue. Still:
1. I'm getting my blood work done now far more frequently (twice per year instead of every other year), with specialized/not typically ordered screening tests;
2. I am redoing the ultrasound every year to track progress; and
3. I am actually taking advice about losing weight and exercise far more seriously than I otherwise would, as these issues often resolve with weight loss.
I am actually healthier now than I was two years ago, and feel better about my physical and mental well-being. All while staying on top of what could have be a life threatening issue if left untreated and ignored.
I look forward to the day when I can go get a monthly MRI-like scan. That would be wonderful.
Almost half of the US population doesn’t even have $1000 saved away nor do they have insurance that covers these tests. It’ll be far more expensive unless insurance deems it necessary, which none of what you’re suggesting would be by definition.
> I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad.
No its not. This is extremely paternalistic. Humans know how to understand noise and statistics. You don't get to decide that for me. I want more lives saved with more information.
It’s not paternalistic. It’s reality. Most people are not equipped to vet all the medical information that comes their way. That’s why we should talk to our doctors about results.
I don’t think my mechanic is being paternalistic when he talks through my car and what is/isn’t important. I like that helps me prioritize things. Why is this any different? In the end a person can tell a doctor “I don’t care run the test” or whatever so what’s the big deal? You can still do what you want. Get that biopsy if you need the peace of mind.
I agree but do you want your mechanic to hide information from you for any reason? For instance, that information can have false positives.
Like, your mechanic hides the fact that your engine may be broken but he's just 70% sure of it. Since he's not 99% sure, he hides it from you. Do you think its a good thing to do?
You could repeat the test, perhaps on a more frequent interval to keep an eye on it. You could follow up with a more specific test, or do confirming blood work. In the meantime you can adjust your diet as a precaution, or get motivated to get in shape just in case.
There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."
Or only consider it a positive once the confidence is high enough that false positives are not a problem anymore.
Getting a test good enough to still make it useful (detect enough of the true positives) would of course be a challenge, but the more data is available, the more feasible that might be.
P.S. The responses ignore what I actually responded to, which was a claim that "The false positive thing is a nonissue" -- where the "thing" is 99% false positives. The only way to respond to information such that "the false positive thing" becomes "a nonissue" is to never respond to it at all. The responses to my comment all address some strawman.
> With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses
> > labeled with diagnoses
I know you’re not suggesting this is easy, but I can absolutely promise that the land of medical reporting, diagnosis and imagery is about a 1000x more complicated and unhinged than you might expect.
What does "solved" mean here? Identifying "the disease" correctly every time? On average identifying the right course of action? For each individual identifying the right course of action? Probabilistically or with certainty?
> pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing.
Somebody should make a startup based around the idea of diagnosing diseases through eg. a drop of blood. Probably need a bunch of big name investors though
In the rest of the world diagnostics aren’t expensive at all and medical data is centralized already (blood, MRI are almost routine for hospital visits, all data stored in govt systems).
During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.
Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school.
Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator, if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infinite amounts of variations in human bodies, which means even the best models focus only on segmenting known organs, and leave anything unknown alone.
This is more true than people realize. My wife and I got full body MRI scans.
Both showed "possible" medical issues. My though was "Great, I have a baseline, in two years I'll get another one and compare".
My wife on the other hand got a bit obsessed about her results and had what was probably an unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.
I suppose you could argue that another way...better safe than sorry...but the stress that is caused by known uncertainty vs unknown uncertainty can be too much.
> ...unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.
The point here is many issues can't be resolved safely with a biopsy or minor procedures, so one ends up under serious risk of a major surgery for something that would never cause any damage.
Plenty of people die this way. If not, one might even thank his doctor for saving his life afterwards.
Not a doctor, but the overdiagnosis concern is at the intersection of three phenomena:
1. Imaging is expensive, just in dollars and time, even without analysis
2. Imaging is not without impact -- CT scans, especially full body scans, expose the body to ionizing radiation
3. Imaging is time-consuming
The net result of these means that full body scans are difficult to interpret. If a doctor given a patient complaint suspects a condition that is sufficiently non-specific that a full-body scan is required, then the scan will be interpreted through the lens of the known progress of the differential diagnosis. And typically these scans must be done without a healthy baseline, so minor findings in this context might have significant diagnostic power when combined with history or other findings.
But on a healthy patient, minor findings are very likely to be noise, because we don't have a great deal of experience with scans of healthy people, for the reasons above.
This technology, if it pans out, gives a way of inverting 1, 2, and 3. If every healthy doctor visit includes one of these scans, then the medical field gets experience interpreting them, and more importantly, when new symptoms occur, previous scans can be compared to determine whether a particular finding in the current scan is new or has changed.
If something like this became commonplace (and accurate enough), then it could be fantastic for research: enabling us to map out what variations are common and which aren't in a way that hasn't previously been feasible.
In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy.
It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.
It's not unreasonable to think that the level of acceptable risk for "the language model parsed my text wrong" is in average much higher than "the medical model misdiagnosed my condition". You can probably come up with scenarios where a language model behaving unexpectedly would have drastic consequences if you imagine them hooked up to automatic systems where they have immediate control over actions that can't easily be reversed, but like, that's why it's a bad idea to use them like that, and they're the exception rather than the rule. It seems plausible that scenarios like that for medical models are a lot closer to the norm than the exception, in which case the tolerance we have for them "filling in the gaps" incorrectly would need to be much smaller.
I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.
This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.
Ultrasonic imaging is definitely not novel. And it requires you tolerate being fully submerged. And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet.
As a consumer health device, we haven't even gotten the population at large to wear biometrics and the CGM fad is over. Full body scans that cannot be used by a physician are not generally useful. If they aren't targeting FDA approval right off the bat, they are wasting their time. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry
> And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry
So, an MRI quality image for less than $2000 and the downside is that you have to use a towel afterwards, and that's not solving a problem?
Oh no, how terrible! I have to use a towel and dry out like when taking a bath or shower...
Now, I have no idea whether this promotional video has any substance behind it, or whether 3D-reconstructed ultrasonic scans are usable by physicians right now. But, come on, your complaint is about getting wet?
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.
1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.
That's likely the datarate of the ADC chips. You would downsample them directly on the FPGA board and maybe perform an FFT or similar transform. 16 TB/s across a few dozen FPGA boards is nothing crazy. After some early stages in the signal processing you might transfer 1 or 2 TB/s over ethernet to the servers. Entirely feasible considering we have 800 gigabit/s ethernet.
You’re completely right, this is why currently ultrasound reconstruction happens on FPGAs. They would need a lot of them given the number of transducers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6057541/
How old are you? I've been conned all my life by tech companies selling us "deliverance from work", "permanent Mars bases", "asteroid mining", "AR/VR everywhere, for everyone, all the time", "crypto will replace money", "3d TVs are the new hot shit", "self driving cars for everyone in 2 years tops"
I don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?
Yeah - this is the truth. I roll my eyes at nearly every "technology breakthrough" headline I see, and specially those involving medical technology. It almost never turns out to be true. Just last week, there were two separate cures for cancer that hit the HN front page. All hype and bullshit, of course. This piece from Midjourney starts off with patients wading into a "golden pool of light". If that doesn't set off your bullshit detector, I don't know what will. This is not how serious people talk about serious medical advances.
I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
I've been sitting here trying to do sleepy morning train commute maths.
1billion scans per month, 50,000 scanners worldwide (!). 1 minute scan time. Lowers platform at 5cm/cm. FTA.
Globally, apparently in 2023 there were 250,000 spas worldwide. [0]
Their numbers would suggest these 1 billion people, getting scanned by 50k scanners, have each scanner doing 20k scans a month. 31 days, 24 hours, we have 744 hours in which to do these. That's 20k scans/744 hours, giving you 26.8 scans/hour. One scan'll be 2.2min. 2 minutes 14 seconds.
If this machine is 200cm big, lowers at 5cm a sec, that gives you 40seconds to lower. One minute to scan. 40 seconds to get you back up, presumably. Even if we're generous and double that, you're at 2 minutes just to lower, scan, and yeet you back up.
Giving you 14 seconds between scans. To clean, maintain, etc. Seems like this machine will output investor AI hype, bacteria, and false positives.
I linked the spa statistics because there's the question of how they'll even get the room for these machines but whatever.
I don't think this changes anything important, but my understanding is that the lowering is the scan -- you go through the ring, which captures data about the slice currently inside it. That gets you down to ~80s, which rounds to a minute (they say "about 5 cm/s").
Now, there's a lot of other reasons to be skeptical (e.g. there's no information on what all of this imaging could actually resolve), but please don't shoot the message.
Lots of folks in here calling out the "billion scans a month" and skipping over the "capable of" part.
They're not claiming they'll perform a billion scans. They're trying to build enough machines that if absolutely all of them were run at 100.00% capacity it would be theoretically possible to do a billion scans a month.
Yeah, that's not just 'cart before the horse', it's more like cart before the wheel. They make a bunch of extraordinary claims yet offer zero evidence, info or even a plausible hypothesis on how those claims might be possible at the scale, timeframe (2027) and unit economics implied. Thank goodness they really thought through the accent lighting for a calming user experience though. Otherwise, I might have been concerned they're not serious. </s>
But they have a picture showing a higher resolution Ultrasound CT result than a 1978 MRI! Surely that's important and useful information by which we can judge their product.
I did see that. And it does look better. Okay, I'm sold! Sign me up for my spa visit including avocado facial peel, genital waxing and computed axial tomography ultrasound.
More seriously, I assumed that CT Ultrasound image is from Butterfly's actual FDA-approved handheld medical device, not the Midjourney 360 submerged ring - as there's no evidence that is working. Since the Midjourney site has no helpful information, I just asked a friendly AI to do a comparison of what's actually proven to work in the Butterfly chip which Midjourney licensed and this 360 degree, full body, submerged concept - and essentially what's not been proven to work are those three differences: 360 degree ring of 40 butterfly chips, full body at once (requiring solving distance and speed challenges as well as a massive signal processing problem to extract and denoise signal), and doing it submerged.
I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.
Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.
Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.
False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.
If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.
If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.
This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.
Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.
Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.
In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.
As we gain more data, might we be able to find patterns in that data that we now cannot see? I'm not only thinking of these regular scans but combining it with other data sources, like maybe regular, more complete blood panels, Apple Watch data, whatever we can get our hands on. Maybe we can find data points that together have a lower false-positive rate, like lump plus increased nightly body temperature plus weight loss.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. That test is wildly more accurate for you than it would be for me, and even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the positive tests would be wrong.
Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.
Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.
The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.
If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?
It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
I can only imagine the swarm of AI agents constantly feeding into this project at different levels of product development and even management. (To be fair, if it works out, it might become a template for future "AI-led organizations")
There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
Ultrasound is totally harmless, but doctors recommend ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable"). Average baby is exposed to 50 - 90 minutes of ultrasound over three visits, though we had to go more frequently for scans for all three of my kids. This would be 36 minutes if you went in every week. If it was possible to get medical quality anatomy scans and avoid transvaginal scans (either because of the tech or simply just going reguarly enough to catch all the imaging you need) then it would win the entire US market for sure: roughly $3-7B for the ultrasounds (3.5M US births at $1-2k per for ultrasounds). also it's a spa -- prenatal wellness spend in the US estimate at $5-7B.
This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.
Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.
Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.
First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
Instead of the value of evaluating a single scan, what about determinations made from evaluating regular deltas between images?
As a layperson, I'm mostly familiar with the concept of "get scanned, and a professional evaluates it"... are there scenarios where the approach of "imaging every few weeks, to make decisions based on trends" is currently done?
(From reading other comment threads here, I suspect the general answer is: other body-scanning startups have proposed the same thing, and it hasn't made sense)
As an aside, I could probably benefit from allergy shots, but the idea of having a regularly scheduled errand to do during the workweek is pretty unappealing, so I never seriously consider it.
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?
Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.
More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
> It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body.
This is exactly my thinking. There are decades of longitudinal studies behind the recommendations physicians make based on given levels of e.g. cholesterol in a standard blood test. And critically, those depend on standard protocols around administering and testing samples.
This would be brand new and would not have any of that infrastructure. Which all tech starts at, good. But I would expect Midjourney to need to dig in for a few decades to get and analyze clinical results and outcomes.
For body scans, I think about how few people would know if they have e.g. three kidneys (or other distortion), and how that impacts/doesn't impact their health.
Most people do not undergo autopsy after death, so it's possible there are correlates between good/bad health outcomes that frequent scanning would eventually reveal. But it would take significant time for this to be apparent.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.
Would it be suitable for basic body composition (as they claim in TFA)? DEXA is a big business and companies push a subscription model where they encourage you to get monthly scans. The results are really fun to look at and the dose is admittedly very low, but you're still getting rastered by an x-ray. It would also explain the spa angle and hence why they're doing that before going for regulation.
> We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.
Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?
FWIW, I tried the prototype. It's very real. I scanned my hand and arm. It showed realtime images of slices of my hand as I dipped my hand in the water. Really amazing IMO. I think this will be a game changer when it comes out. It's just so easy to scan yourself.
Did you get any interpretation of the imaging? It sounds cool (I'd take an ultrasound selfie) but it has to be medically useful for something before enough doctors grade enough images to kickstart the data collection for diagnosing more.
I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.
The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.
It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.
The spa approach also achieves what’s probably the key ingredient to making this useful medically — consistent data over time. We know the “what’s this fuzzy bit!?!” hysteria with elective scans can be counterproductive, but if you truly had monthly scans going back 2 years, the fuzzy bit could in fact mean something.
Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?
In the early years of X-rays, doctors found all sorts of patients with major organ displacement, and performed surgery to, for example, hold the liver or kidneys “up”.
It took a while to realise that textbooks since Leonardos time had drawn and based anatomy on (dead) patients lying on a slab. But X-rays were taken with (alive) patients standing up. So of course there was a lot of “your kidney has slipped!”
I fully support and applaud this kind of medical innovation (even if … why midjourney?) but we need to be careful of the medical term VOMIT (victim of modern imaging technology). At some point we need a human doctor to say “calm down, live your life, eat right, exercise right, and accept that somethings don’t need to be panicked over yet - come back in six months”
A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.
So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."
But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...
If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.
But what if most "masses" are cysts or other harmless structures that form during the 80 years we're walking around? I think that after about their 3rd useless biopsy people start to feel the problem with this.
Of course we can keep tuning and tuning the models, but in the limit it may well make more sense to wait for symptoms. At least that is the current experience.
Now maybe this machine will make sense in screening age 55+, 20 year+, 2 pack+ smokers for Lung lesions (where a much large portion of detected lesions are true positives). We do this currently with CT and this may be better or cheaper. But it doesn't look like it is, and it looks like far (very far) lower res than MRI (often the follow-up of a CT-scan).
Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.
You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
The sci-fi writes itself. Someone hacks the spa’s schedule to find out when you’re getting your scan done, then hacks the machine to push the output to 11 when you’re in, and liquifies your insides.
"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
Focused ultrasound is already used as an actual surgery method and they have to carefully balance the parameters so it does not produce heating and damage [unrelated] tissue. Obviously a scanner would not aim for the same power/effects but it is possible to cause harm, yes
> You want as much data as you can get about your health
The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.
1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.
2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.
I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains.
Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
I don't think there's much difference? The technicians that perform the tests are not doctors. You usually see a doc for 5 mins at the end, to discuss any anomalies. Even then, they're just going to refer you to see your GP or a specialist. At the end of the day, the ningendoku is just information that your doctors can access. I'd much prefer a high-resolution full body scan.
Either way, the patient should make the choice about whether they want that info, not an insurance company or a know-it-all armed with a dubious study concluding that asymptomatic conditions are better left undiscovered.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
That's definitely an important point to consider, in fact something I think everyone in these conversations should be cognizant of, and also why it makes me believe the actual conversation should move to whether the device improves false positives/negatives rates or not (or at least has a chance to), which then might warrant wider access/use.
A better question is if people are going high-res, why not go high-res with tests whose accuracy is known, and for which there are useful, data-driven treatments?
Instead of casting a net of unknown quality every month, comparing against a null dataset (there does not exist a large dataset of these scans with outcomes for given markers).
Why not advocate cheap, easy blood/urine tests with higher frequency? Those tests do have large reference datasets with outcomes. And they have prescriptive value: there is likely more benefit to catching hypertension or diabetes earlier in more people.
Something doesn't add up. The entire Japanese healthcare system is built around the idea that preventative testing for asymptomatic conditions is effective. You can read all about it, if you want.
Personally, I think you've swallowed some kind of health insurance industry black pill, whether you know it or not.
I don't need to, I've lived in Japan and done the Ippan Kenshin which is the once a year health checkup. It consists of getting your weight, height blood pressure measured, an eye test, urine tests for diabetes and a blood test for cholesterol. That's very reasonable.
The one thing some doctors still tend to do is a chest-xray, which is not reasonable. They do it because tuberculosis was widespread in post-war Japan and they just kept doing it, but it has no positive impact on mortality rates.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
I'm not so worried about the data being useful, I'm worried about the machine actually working.
I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
> What's so bad about having some false positives?
Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.
It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.
Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs
I have thought that extremely accessible, portable, non-radiation imaging would be revolutionary. Imagine every doctor - or even every person - had a handheld thing they could wave over your affected area to get a high res 3d image of the issue. Of course we have mri, xray, and ultrasound, but those are big and expensive. Obviously there are engineering reasons that is the case, but It seems like a concerted effort to make imaging more portable and accessible, coupled with ai to help analyze could bring about all sorts of follow-on health improvements. Your regular practitioner could check you for heart blockages, clots that lead to stroke, cancers etc as a matter of course. I’m not sure stepping into a golden vat of water is what I have in mind but medical imaging does seem like a possible area for drastic innovation.
Actually doctors tend to frown on people getting full body MRI scans with no symptoms because they tend to cause many false positives.These false positives often trigger a stressful cascade of unnecessary follow-up imaging, bloodwork, and invasive biopsies.
I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough.
Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth.
But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.
Super cool. Reminds me of Mary Lou Jepsen's (who did One Laptop Per Child) company Openwater, which is using some kinda infrared holography, also as an alternative to MRIs.
Supposedly they can be made lightweight and wearable.
One thing invents a bunch of fake bullshit using artist's work and the other is supposed to give you an image of something real and meaningful that wasn't just hallucinated or patched together. All from the guy who brought us Leap Motion, a gimmicky product that failed to live up to the hype. This isn't exactly encouraging. If it actually works we won't need a press release on their website, we'll hear about it in medical journals and it'll be doctors singing its praises. You'll find it being used in hospitols and not pop-up spas.
Only after that happens will I have to even consider how comfortable I am with the idea of handing over what they suggest will be massive amounts of highly personal medical data to this company and how much I trust them not to exploit that information for their own purposes and profit.
After reading this first, it looked almost like a joke, like how Google used to do Google- TISP Toilet Internet Service Provider https://archive.google/tisp/install.html
Even now without Xrays it is very hard to really even see if there are blocks in your artery usuing ultrasound (Echocardiography alone). Ultrasound is used indirectly by measuring blood flow difference between stress and rest - not a spa session anyway. Looks like a prank really
3D Ultrasound helps a lot in this regard. Getting flow velocity out and tissue motion is very possible if you can support the data rates (in my group we've had some luck getting coronary artery 3D flow out using 3D ultrasound probes). The issue is that 2D ultrasound and flow is an unsolvable problem, so you really do need all 3 dimensions here.
I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.
This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.
If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.
Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.
(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)
It will be terrible for brain imaging. The ultrasound waves can’t go through the skull and thus can’t image the brain. Additionally you would have to drown the patient since you need a medium other than air between the ultrasound emitting probe and the body which is water in their device.
CT is more than sufficient for imaging the brain in a case of trauma and MRI is not automatically better than CT in every case.
Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.
If this all works, and becomes widely available, I wonder if people would get a lot of health anxiety. Now they can see stuff that is normal, but strange or unexpected.
I’m no doctor by any means, but what if, as an example, an organ fluctuates in size, or composition, naturally. A medical professional would know these things, but a random person off the street might get stressed out and start to panic, or perhaps overcompensate with their diet or something.
I think more data is generally good, but data without context or insight can be problematic.
Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.
You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.
The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.
Awesome work. The second video is great. I don’t know enough about medical science to consider viability and shortcomings, but I’m impressed by the dream. Keep cooking.
And even if the device fails, I’m sure the spa will be nice.
This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.
> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
> What This Leads To
> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.
There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.
There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.
What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.
I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.
I can only applaud. Regardless of whether this device is possible, or economically viable, this is a brave move and a bold vision. Taking bigger risks is what what makes the advances possible.
I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.
Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.
Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.
I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.
They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...
I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.
I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?
Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article:
> As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.
Yeah sure. That's not going to be a sustainable model. Once the tech is available and money is to be made, lots of for-profit alternatives will appear with marketing and lobby budgets that will take over the market.
Remember Open AI was a non-profit at some point. Look at how that turned out.
I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.
Exactly. With "you" in the original post I didn't mean the exact actor right now but whoever will be in charge eventually. When good actors leave the stage, you are only left with the bad ones.
An AI can be trained on body scans to detect diseases, tumours etc. Ideally this can be trained on real scans with real diseases but you could also train on synthetic data (synthetic bodies and/or synthetic diseases).
You can also focus ultrasonic waves to destroy (vaporise or cook) diseased tissue.
A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion scans ago was last month?
In order for 50k scanners to perform 1 billion scans in a month, they need to be run nearly 24/7. It will require (in a 30 day month) an average of 129.6 seconds per scan, including both the 60 second scan time and moving people on and off the scanner surface. You get just over a minute to move someone off, clean the system, and get the next person onto the platform. If you neglect cleaning the system, and everyone is ready to go, then this is just barely possible if it's 100% reliable.
If they sat idle for 90% of the time, they wouldn't have enough time for the 60 second scan, let alone moving people on and off the platform. The math for their claimed target does not work.
My comment was "if every hospital had one" rather than "if 50k hospitals had one" but either way, the math gets to the order of magnitude stated. Nitpicking how much buffer they gave themselves for cleaning doesn't disprove the math - the target is years away, and solving a trivial gap is just a matter of speeding up the scan or putting multiple people in.
> As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.
Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.
Imaging is not preventive care. Exercise is. Good food without chemicals is. Good sleep is.unfortunately these important parts cannot easily be monetized to provide stock options to the insiders/
Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?
This is one of the creepiest "big AI" product launches I've read. I know it's becoming a meme, but that spa looks like something from a Black Mirror episode.
If they were just creating a new less-invasive and differently informative alternative to fMRI / PET / EEG / CT for researchers and doctors to use in hospitals, where experienced human doctors were given agency in finding out how best to use the tool and interpret the results (understanding all the caveats that go for full body scans, false positive rates and so on[0]), then that would be amazing, a tiny step forward for the human race. But packaged like this, eww.
Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.
After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.
When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.
It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and
- it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would be justified. Chemo is a life saver when it's saving lives -- if the alternative is no symptoms, it just ruins your life for a profoundly uncertain upside.
Well, you've reduced a rational position to absurdity here. The concern isn't that someone is going to require chemotherapy. The concern is that an asymptomatic condition will go undisclosed until it is symptomatic, at which point preventative treatments are futile.
Even if we accepted your example, there is a fundamental inconsistency, since doctors in America regularly prescribe very serious drug interventions for patients who essentially self-diagnose for being neurotic/adhd/etc.--actually a much worse problem than the one you're so eager to curtail.
If you seriously think this is a realistic scenario, you should call your doctor and tell him you've decided you have cancer and would like to order chemotherapy. See what he says.
Nobody is deciding for themselves to do chemo because they think something looks funny on a scan. All the scan gives them is a reason to talk to their doctor, who will do all the usual due diligence before deciding on treatment, if any.
And on the flip side, I hear stories all the time of people who DO have symptoms but they get dismissed by their doctor as stress or food allergies or whatever until it's too late. Maybe if patients were armed with a scan that shows a mass at the site of their abdominal pain, there would be fewer of these horror stories.
Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
one nice thing may be way to enhance penetrative ultrasound eg smaller immersive ultrasound tomography in smaller dip tank hey stick your leg in this thinner immersive tunnel , e.g., extremity up-close immersion or trunk wrappers vs just wand-based?
Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.
If you could obtain volumetric/3D ultrasound data that was not operator dependent, that would be great.
US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.
However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.
More just interested in medical imaging in general but: unobstructed soft tissue imaging is possible with this, e.g. abdomen. You can get reasonably good differentiation between types of tissues using ultrasound in this context although there is the potential for ambiguous findings where further scans like MRI will be required to get less ambiguous information about it.
Chest cavity, brain tissue scanning etc. will likely remain unrealistic as ultrasound waves won't penetrate bone and the ribs and skull will interfere.
How much is a scan going to cost? The video motions petabyte per scan? These types are scans (medical images) are extremely dense and large in size, storing short or long term images sounds like its going to be extremely expensive when combined with AI analysis, etc. Not to Mention the cost of operating a Spa is not cheap, especially if your buying real estate, and the cost of the machine itself.
Is this a dystopian Spa, where full scans cost 50k, and basic ones are 1-5k?
I think the scanner outputs petabytes of raw data that then get processed down into images, so you would only need to store an image per slice ideally, kinda like MRI DICOM files.
I'm just guessing here but similar to a CAT scan, having actuators/probes at all angles could mean you can get an image around such obstacles. skull is probably an exception and it's the reason why we don't see any head scans in any one of the videos.
I personally have been dealing with an elbow injury for over 3 years. I have been to all the known places in the bay area and shown it. One surgery, countless doctors (some who took MRIs), and many physiotherapy sessions later the problem still exists.
I believe if a willing doctor takes images all over the elbow, and looks carefully, they will find the cause. But they aren’t willing.
Disappointed with the healthcare here, I for one, would love a solution that takes comprehensive data of my body and tell me what’s going on.
At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.
Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.
my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.
my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?
Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.
The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.
This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:
a) it is possible to construct such a scanner
b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything
c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful
But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.
For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.
20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.
At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”
3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.
I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.
If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.
This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.
The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.
So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.
These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.
Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.
I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.
What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...
Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.
I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve
Interesting but many issues which have been listed here are valid. This is my take on the largest of them.
Preventive testing is not always positive.
False negatives creates a false sense of security and false positives drives unnecessary medical procedures. For example, what if this instrument sees "something" and a doctor then follows up with a biopsy, x-ray or explorative surgery. These will all have negative side effects. There has even been a debate of if mammography is a net positive. I think it might be but I'm just saying that even such a thing is debatable. The question is not only if the these early tests find anything, its also a question of whether detecting it early changes the prognosis. Maybe its untreatable anyway? Or maybe it would still be treatable if detected later? And then comes the cost of course, is it economical to do these scans on a population level relative to the alternative cost.
Building medical systems is not for the faint of heart.
I was part of a startup building a Micro CT system with the long term goal of using it to detect tumors in biopsies live during surgery (1 um resolution for cm-sized samples) without waiting a week for the normal analysis. We also started with non-medical instrument (general research) and we never got to the medical instrument before we ran out of money (we engineers were too bad at sales). But we did study up on the (European) standards quite a bit. They are not crazy in any way. Its simply that you follow good engineering practice BUT it is hard to move from building a non-medical system to medical system after the fact. The standard is a process standard so it basically says "You should have followed this process when you designed your product". And you need be real careful setting your Intended Use and showing that you have Verified and Validated that your system can be used for the intended use. So most likely they need to build one product now (Body Composition Analysis), use that for research and then set up their Quality Management System before they rebuild everything from requirements to risk analysis to test plans to hardware to software. 10 years is probably on the low side for this and quite the cost.
TL;DR: "Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body."
You don't need to build a perfect med spa, you only need to control the patents of the key pieces of a med spa.
This is nothing more thab a prophylactic patent grab to stifle competition and progress in this space for the next decade and/or hoover up patient data behind a paywall where they will gladly lease the weights and bias cure to you own disease back to you in the form of a subscription.
This is the most insane thing to happen to medical imaging
To understand Midjourney Medical (MM), think about current major options:
- CT/X-ray: harmful if done too much && can't do for pregnant women
- MRI: slow, have to stay still, no metal
- Ultrasound: really low fidelity
Midjourney Medical is fast, high fidelity, and perfectly safe!
> It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation.
...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?
Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?
It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.
The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.
At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.
Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?
HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes.
I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators.
It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself.
There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.
I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though??
Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI.
The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.
> Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated.
I have questions in general.
Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous.
Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought.
Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.
So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something.
The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?
Not a joke, they really think that doing billions of full body scans will reduce healthcare costs and make people less anxious.
Any scientist not on the payroll will tell you the opposite. You will get millions of false positives, causing anxiety and unnecessary interventions. This has been studied extensively and we have the stats.
I too wish I could just jump into a machine every month and it declares me free of cancer. Instead it will find new irregularities every time with no easy way to confirm it's benign. This idea does not work.
Generative models have been used in healthcare for a while for things like drug design and data generation. Not to mention all the algorithms (and probably ML) used in generating results for MRI and CT scans. I don't think this is that crazy provided they can prove it's effective.
You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.
I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.
Well, the math is the other way. If you assume a 30 day month, you have 2,592,000 seconds each month to perform scans in. With 1,000,000,000 target scans and 50,000 machines, that's 20,000 scans per month per machine.
If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.
Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable.
Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).
Yep, and with full body submersion, they'll need to change out that water regularly. And people think data centers waste water, Midjourney says, "Hold my beer."
spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho
Great, a hallucinated output that only the super wealthy can afford, only to waste doctors' time with the need to run every test again at huge expense. Can we not leave medicine to the professionals? Creating a ghibli rip-off is not the same as diagnosing cancer.
I would just add that my wife is a doctor and in the age of AI it's truly unbearable. In addition to super long hours and stress they now have to deal with patients coming and thinking they know better than people who spent more than a decade in education because of what some chatbot told them.
Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.
I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?
I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.
It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.
Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".
Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.
Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.
Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.
Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:
- This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo.
- They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true "full body" in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that's why we use CT for lung screening!)
- The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite - small, deep structures.
- "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians, but I in general have no problem with people collecting data on themselves where they can. To me it's similar to heart rate monitors or home blood pressure cuffs. The main issue here is education, so that patients know what the data is and is not telling them. The more complex the data, the more difficult that is.
- Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that "it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs", I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.
> The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited.
Radiologist as well. Remember this is full wave inversion not pulsed wave B mode. You can get much more useful information from both high low frequency and capture transmitted waves.
There is promise with this and we use it for example with MRgFUS. With advanced computational models or patient specific CT/ZTE MR aberration correction it is theoretically very feasible to image the brain with ultrasound, whether that’s more useful than say portable low field strength MR is a different question altogether.
> This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT.
Not to be pedantic but since this is a tech forum I would clarify that FWI US is computed tomography by definition (at least in this and many applications). Gas degrades conventional CT too, it’s just worse with US as you have little to no forward propagation and of course innumerable interfaces in the lungs to reflect and scatter.
Yes, I was thinking about FUS as well! There are clearly ways to penetrate bone, but I have not seen it used for imaging, only for ablation. But I am not an expert there and it sounds like you have more knowledge in that area than I do.
Pedantry appreciated.
What's the use of FWI for a moving target - which someone floating in a spa most definitely will be?
This is a fever dream, not a practical diagnostic technology.
I can imagine it being useful if you happened to own an imaging product and wanted to train a model on human body shapes and sizes.
But dunking people in a golden spa - why golden? why not pink or teal? - and waving a ring of US over them, at distances which make high resolution impractical, to tell them their medical fortunes is... eccentric.
I'm being scathing because there's no solid science behind this, and if there had been solid science MJ would have published it in a paper.
This is pure marketing. And if you're going to do that, you should at least include some dolphin petting.
What does "more useful" mean in this context? Can you solve gas-filled bowels with the mode difference?
Full wave inversion uses all of the information from the wave and more intense computational tomography to image structures that pulse wave B mode cannot, though gases are still a problem. Computationally, if you squint, it's similar to the work Midjourney does with AI image generation, as it progressively generates a structure that fits the data.
Ultrasonic waves can penetrate most structures in humans, including the brain. For example, with focused ultrasound (as they mentioned with MRgFUS) you can burn specific structures in the middle of the brain without any incision.
To use this for imaging, you need lots of transducers (MRgFUS typically uses 1024 for ablation, and Midjourney is proposing 358,000 for imaging) and massive advances in computational tomography capabilities. There will still likely be pockets of low confidence where there's a lot of air, like in the lungs. But with sufficient information on what's happening around those areas, you'd still have something that's medically useful.
Ultrasound researcher here: this work is almost certainly not full wave inversion. You're right that FWI can be done in this kind of setup. Notably, a lot of people are trying to use circular arrays of ultrasound sensors to do FWI, particularly in the brain or the breast. But, it's a challenging inverse problem to solve and as far as I know, it's still extremely slow - nowhere near realtime.
The data they show is almost certainly a normal beamforming algorithm like delay and sum, possibly with some simple speed of sound correction. The most similar paper I know of is here in Nature Biomedical Engineering from a team at Caltech. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4
I do a lot of MRI analysis including segmentation of small structures in the hippocampus called the hippocampal subfields. To collect these segmentations, we collect partial-field-of-view high in-plane resolution T2-weighted images on a 3 or 7 Tesla magnet. These sequences are generally only included in research protocols if the research specifically cares about hippocampal subfields...therefore they are rarely collected. There have been attempts to enable segmentation of these small structures using lower resolution T1-weighted scans, leveraging deep-learning or other models trained on concurrent T2w high resolution scans and the lower resolution scans within the same subject, allowing the model to predict the higher resolution information from the lower resolution inputs. This produces spectacularly beautiful segmentation on shitty data. Data whose resolution is about the same as the thickness of the structures you are segmenting or less. The problem is this: 1. The lower resolution image barely has any information in it on these smaller structures 2. The accuracy of the resulting segmentation depends entirely on how much the person fits the training distribution. But much research is on specific populations: children, autism, etc. 3. Some big names in imaging analysis tools have published these tools, lending their credibility to them. 4. The beautiful segmentations and (3) tend to convince non hippocampal experts that the resulting data is trustworthy, especially to an eager beaver researcher trying to maximize the impact of their already collected datasets.
I've rejected a number of papers for this.
But my point is this. Midjourney Medical might train a model to produce pretty images with this technique, but the more they need to depend on deep-learning models to get usable data, the more that the match between the training distribution and patient will matter.
This is a critical point. I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?
> I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?
Related to that point, I was so turned off by Midjourney's post about this because it absolutely reeked of all the red flags I've seen over the past 2 decades when Silicon Valley-types try to "disrupt" the medical field. The post was titled "Midjourney Medical", but it approached everything from a "wellness" perspective, i.e. how can individuals "optimize" their health by numerous scans/tests/analyses, it's a spa not a clinic, etc. etc.
Where were the research papers? The peer-reviewed articles? If you're truly trying to "disrupt" some area of medicine, it doesn't make you immune to the peer-review process.
I'll fully admit I'm not qualified to assess the claims made in the article, but if Midjourney wants to be taken seriously, I would hope they would avoid an approach that looks a lot more like Theranos in their early days, vs a sober analysis of how their tech compares to existing standards of care.
I'm not a medical doctor at all, just an engineer who works in medical devices and I'm definitely sceptical about this.
I'm not totally sure of the value of an imaging system that only gives you very low resolution images if they're not accurate enough to determine anything from. You'd need a secondary CT or MRI anyway so why not skip to that?
My real concern is the dependence on external servers to reconstruct the images
Edit: From reading other people's comments, people are acting as if this is the first device trying to sell itself as improving pre-diagnosis imaging and this is totally revolutionary. This is not, and if any of the other products have convinced the entire medical industry that frequent imaging is beneficial then neither will this
"why not skip to that?" MRIs and CT scans are expensive, require referrals, and you usually can't get them without believing you already have an issue. If this technology can get to a point where it's high enough resolution, cheap enough to just have at spas, and shared across the world then people will be able to know if/when they should get that secondary scan before symptoms start.
Probably cheaper and substantially better contrast resolution to use low field strength perma magnet MRIs with advanced computation to be honest.
Not a physician. Some observations on these statements.
The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have."
The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?"
Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to look at things has a tendency to reveal information that we never knew we needed.
For example, for years I thought of blood sugar as something that was either in a good or bad range. Then I tried a continuous blood sugar monitor. The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening. There's so much more to learn when you get a higher resolution (temporal in that case) view into your body.
Another wonderfully hopeful example is the retinal imaging ML work done by google. A completely non-invasive image of the retina for diabetic issues, that also happened to be able to predict things like age, sex, smoking status, previous cardiac events and more! Just take high-res pictures of things! The body is interconnected in ways that you can infer from one system so much about others.
So while I don't think anything the Dr. said is "wrong", I think it represents a very common blinkered mindset of pragmatic practitioners who need to deliver reliable performance daily.
Your points are well taken, and I think this is the fundamental struggle of anyone who works in a narrow and deep field. It's truly difficult to see things from a different point of view sometimes. It certainly could turn out that this ultrasound setup gives truly new information, but, it isn't really a new way of generating an image, it's the same physics we've used to generate images from sound waves for decades, and that modality comes with some pretty hard physical limitations that this demo does not directly address. Time will tell, if they don't run out of money. I'm hopeful!
It's true that sometimes deeply experienced professionals are less likely to discover or accept novel methods based on new approaches or technologies. Unfortunately, in this case MJ's proposed product is being deceptively presented to appear as if it's the kind of bold new approach we all hope to see in medicine - but it's not. It's a repackaging of an existing product that's already on the market.
MJ is buying the transducer chips used in Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device (it's not an R&D license, they're literally buying the same chip). The repackaging is to turn it into a contactless, 360 degree-at-once, 60 second full body scanner. Every aspect of the repackaging provides the same singular benefit over the Butterfly device: convenience. Unfortunately, every aspect of the repackaging has the same two downsides: lower resolution (meaning lower diagnostic value) and higher cost.
Spoiler alert: moving the imaging transducers 200-400 times farther away from your organs and introducing a large volume of water between the transducer and your skin in no way improves resolution or diagnostic value (quite the opposite (exponentially!)). Having 40 transducers on a hula hoop ring that far away offers no value over having one transducer much closer and moving to as many angles as necessary to image the volume of interest - except it might be a few minutes faster.
So, this isn't an "exciting new approach to medical imaging." It's a marketing repackage of an existing medical product into a non-medical, higher-cost, 'spa experience' with trendy, tech-adjacent appeal and vaguely medical-ish window dressing (it's carefully disclaimed has having no medical value in this form). Since the exact same chip is already available in a much less expensive, far more ideal form that's fully repositionable to any angle, is closer (and can deform skin to get closer still), the real question is how much medically-relevant diagnostic value could MJ's repackage of the same chip offer over the existing better, cheaper implementation? Butterfly's version is already FDA approved with proven diagnostic value. And all of MJ's hype around 'AI-powered' isn't about improving diagnostics, it's only necessary to recover at least some signal from the hurricane of noise and multi-path issues created by the adding MJ's cool-looking convenience features. But slowly being lowered into that tank with the neat ambient light ring sure looks sci-fi, right?
Exponentially would make it computationally intractable by definition, and is the proposal suggestion that having simultaneous sensors can be used to reconstruct more information than the conventional way of using a handheld single sensor? Is that plausible?
Good question. Trying to 'steel-man' MJ's approach, that was the only possible benefit vs the existing Butterfly product which I hadn't crossed out yet, so I asked the only actual radiologist here about the possibility of having additional receivers off-axis from the emitter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590631).
But frankly, I'm losing interest trying to glean what someone might be thinking, when they're being so intentionally opaque while making such grandiose vague claims. The bottom line is, if they really thought this way of nerfing Butterfly's chip '9-steps back' with disadvantages, would truly unlock 12-steps forward in actual medical imaging utility, they wouldn't be launching it as a 'feature' of a vanity spa with nothing but vague 'tech visionary' puffery.
> The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening.
you were surprised to find out that stress and carbs raise blood sugar?
I'm doing this now, and the thing I find most surprising is that there seems to be some invisible persistent state that gives high or low sugar a sort of momentum - so if I've been doing a fair amount of physical activity for a month, I can lay slugabed for two days and still drive to have a slice of pizza in the afternoon without trouble; but if I've been slacking on the activity piece, or arguing with my spouse, or travelling and eating a lot of dubious things, I can walk five kms to a pizza place, eat the slice, walk the 5 kms back, and it will still spike. Also I have issues with the CGM being higher than the prick-blood test, like 40 points higher rather consistently. A1C is still dropping, but the CGM numbers are more directionally accurate than numerically accurate.
That “invisible persistent influence on your current state” are your metabolic processes.
this is why i always come to hacker news for the expert opinions. thank you for being critical yet optimistic.
You don't know if the opinion is expert. You don't know who that person is or what credentials they even have. Blindly trusting something that sounds right is a terrible way to inform yourself.
I'd agree more if MidJourney had decided to announce their product plans with a white paper instead of glossy 'product vision' marketing spin and virtually no information as to how they hope to solve the vast technical leaps necessary to convert the transducer chip they licensed from Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device into a contactless, 360 degree, 60 second full body scanner.
Given MJ's extraordinary claims and lack of detail, I thought the GP's response was well-calibrated, especially given MJ's unfortunate choice to lean into vaguely implying this has 'medical' utility, despite providing zero evidence (or even plausible theory) their approach could ever have diagnostic value greater than Butterfly's FDA-approved, handheld, full contact USB pocket scanner which is available now and plugs into a mobile phone. They are using 40 of the exact same transducer chip (designed for full contact use) from 200-400 times farther away. You can use the existing full contact Butterfly scanner today and just move it to 40 different angles. It would take a couple minutes longer, provide vastly greater resolution and is proven to have diagnostic value.
Bayes Theorem...the chances this rather milquetoast and balanced analysis was written by someone with no knowledge is vanishingly low IMO.
With LLM tools being widely available, it's extremely high, imo.
Idea for a website/documentary -- have experts respond to a piece of news, or provide commentary. Put a few expert pieces alongside a few LLM outputs, have people guess/work out which is which. Have the same people tell you why.
If on a website, rank the results; present the 'how I worked it out' info for the best spotters (and you could interview them). Keep the answers secret for a few weeks, then reveal them in a way that the game is still playable.
It's repeatable, every few months you could interview new experts (or the old ones again), get new models.
Kinda like the critical thinking version of images of a pelican on a bike.
I love your idea and would enjoy seeing the results of that controlled experiment.
I'm also interested in the broader impact of using LLMs in place of web search for general Q&A when we want 'to know things'. It's pretty clear the way LLMs are being used for knowledge acquisition now is often less accurate while 'feeling' more certain. Even if we set aside explicit hallucinations, I suspect it's still less accurate.
Hah, I'm neither a bot nor written with any help from an LLM, but I'll take the fact that you can't tell the difference as a compliment :)
It's not meant as a slight against you, but an observation on people blindly trusting Internet commenters in a time where our trust is (or should be?) at an all-time low for such content, so we should check our priors to ensure what we're consuming can be trusted and is verifiably true as LLMs exude confidently incorrect behavior.
I want to point out that you are posting from a 5-months old account (squarely within a time frame where LLM-powered accounts would be created), with an UUID-sounding username, claiming a 10-year-old professional history in the field, and using those credentials to bring up the possibility that a 14-year-old account claiming to be an MD with `md` in the username and _lots_ of comments is LLM-generated and asking for skepticism.
It's not particularly helpful; you could easily have done the 5 minutes of work.
Congrats, you've discovered people are always joining an anonymous platform, and some want pseudonymity? If I put "md" in my name, am I suddenly a doctor then? Your reading comprehension needs some work, I've been working for 16 years and it isn't being used as a cudgel to appeal to authority, but sharing some context about who I am and what my perspectives are.
Someone using md in their account name for 14 years is really committing to the bit if they aren’t a doctor.
I went back in their comment history before LLMs existed and found comments where they claim to be a doctor and sound like they know what they are taking about. I’m not a doctor but my wife and many of our friends are, so I know what they sound like.
I appreciate your feedback, I did not dig through their comment history to make that discovery, but saw someone showing full trust in a random user on an anonymous forum and wanted to encourage more critical behavior.
I get the intention, but you made an assumption that the person you replied to didn’t spend 30 seconds find some more supporting evidence before they made their post.
But as far as trust goes, Hacker News has historically been a fairly high trust community. LLMs have the potential to change this dynamic, but I don’t think encouraging people to assume that every post is an LLM is helpful. I don’t think a community with that level of distrust is possible, and at that point we should just all walk away.
Maybe it's the time I've joined at, but I've noticed a lot of bot users and stories which has soured my view a bit. Thanks for engaging in good faith and giving me context, I'll try to have more grace in the future
> Maybe it's the time I've joined at, but I've noticed a lot of bot users and stories
It is.
The parent comment is demonstrating the exact type of internet savvy critical thinking that you’re ostensibly arguing for, but you seem to be reflexively defensive.
Making an ad hominem attack on a random poster asking for critical thinking on who to trust and then making false claims is not "internet savvy critical thinking" since they can't string two thoughts together coherently (a bio blurb vs. an appeal to authority in a random comment).
Not taken negatively, and you're right. This is even more difficult with things that are opinion, and not clearly verifiable.
"Blindly trusting" is not the same as "learning some new questions to ask about the validity of the given claims". The Midjourney announcement is not providing detailed medical credentials either.
We don't know if any of the opinions on HN are expert for that matter. Yet somehow, it's survived and grown for 20 years.
they have md in the username
True.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
> ultrasound is not CT
They're using "CT" in its literal sense: tomography*, using computers. In this case, ultrasound is the penetrating wave rather than x-ray. It is of course a very different thing than what the medical world knows as "CT" today.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomography
The problem is the other way around. That we somehow accepted that X-Rays/Röntgen is the only way to do CT.
we can do tomography on any round-robin-rectify multi-pov source, doesn't have to be x-ray is just de facto use in medicine, closer to at min marketing ed problem
> Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine,
True. My more nuanced take on it: For most chronic conditions (including cancer) diagnostics have improved but resolution has not. The PR machine of course hypes things to make it seem like we have more cures today that in the past. What is have is more diagnostics and more procedures.
I'm far more willing to trust someone in the field every day (you), over keyboard warriors who want to validate their new toy is alive.
They spent a lot of time selling the spa, and not a lot of time showing us the data.
That's because there isn't any data yet, at least not enough from real patients to be meaningful. I would love to see some of the raw imaging data they have generated though, if that's what you mean.
> I would love to see some of the raw imaging data
Just look at images from the Butterfly IQ3 handheld ultrasound device which has been on the market a while (https://www.butterflynetwork.com/iq3). Midjourney is repackaging 40 of the exact same chip around a big, non-contact ring. Since MJ is placing the devices 200 to 400 times farther away from your organs and sending sound waves through a large volume of water before contacting your skin (instead of a thin smear of gel) the images will be much lower fidelity.
Given that current ultrasound probe technology (including butterfly) relies on the probe being essentially in contact with the tissue being imaged, it’s hard to imagine how this set up can be effective with the imaged volume so far from the transducers, since there will be a huge amount of dissipation in the water bath, but maybe they have found a way to solve that? Also, I imagine that the quality of the images, such as they are, will fall off very quickly in larger patients. Will be interesting to see.
Exactly my concern too. There are techniques like synthetic aperture focusing which can correct some of these errors to some degree but they're complex and have harsh limits of their own. It's always better to not have the errors introduced by the distance and water volume in the first place. The thing which makes no sense about this entire approach is we already can not have those errors.
I've been looking up relevant data and reading some papers to determine if I'm missing something there but, so far, the approach looks pretty much 'all downside' with the few upsides being: 1. Faster to image full body, 2. Don't have to have some technician poking you with an ultrasound wand, 3. Looks cool?
But I'm just an imaging and DSP guy, you're the actual radiologist. If you don't mind there's one question I'm not sure about. Trying to 'strong-man' the product concept, the only potential benefit of the approach I haven't crossed out is if there's any meaningful value from having additional simultaneous receivers off-axis from the emitter? I mean value which can't be gained from just moving a single emitter to another axis, grabbing more images and then cross-registering those. Even then, the off-axis receivers are always co-planar with the emitter, which seems like it would greatly limit any utility.
The downside column I've got so far is vast... and it's not just distance, there's also the turbulance in the water, micro-bubbles from the ongoing submersion of body and platform into the tank, the thermal disruption at the boundary layer, the fact the human is freestanding with no support while being submerged means they'll be far less stationary than a human comfortably reclined on a ultrasound table, it goes on and on.
Right, this is where I'm at, in trying to 'strong-man' it. CT is great as a source and a detector, but when you add multiple detectors and can use scattering to your advantage, we're able to lower rad dosage for comparable images. So, yeah, what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better than we thought.
That's the only way this thing adds up in my head.
> what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better
Yes, that's the most charitable 'Steel-man' possibility I've still got open. Still a lot of unknowns but I suspect they're just unknown to me and probably already known to those in the field. It's not like this off-axis receivers concept is remotely new in computational imaging. So I went looking for priors and proxies that use the same idea - and found a bunch. There are dual-wand, dual-leaf and quad-leaf 'flex-jaw' arrays that basically just add extra receivers on tilting 'wings' to conform to cylindrical and non-uniform shapes. They don't seem to be used much for medical imaging but are common in things like metallurgical inspection, materials analysis, etc.
I'm still unclear why they aren't used much in medical but I suspect it has to do with the fact that medical ultrasound is highly constrained. It can work well in fat and soft-tissues but bone absorbs and reflects ultrasound fiercely and different tissue densities respond differently. This makes off-axis receivers likely to be occluded, reducing how often it contributes to improving imaging.
My biggest question about the MJ product hypothesis isn't whether it can work, it's whether it will work meaningfully better than easier, cheaper surface-contact methods using the same transducer chips. If it's true that additional off-axis receivers do provide increased value for medical imaging, then it should be even better to do that with a flexible semi-arc of chips that can directly touch the skin. I just don't see how any off-axis benefit can overcome the drastic signal degradation introduced by moving the chips 200-400 times farther way and trying to correct for the turbulent hurricane of that huge liquid volume.
I did find some phantom images, but...
https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery
There also isn’t a spa yet.
I have a friend who may be dying. It's not cancer but equally dangerous. They caught it early but they're powerless to do anything. We're just watching, waiting, and hoping.
> "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians
For a lot of these things I wonder why they don't just do multiple scans just to see how things develop. Is it a cost issue?
That's generally exactly what we do, which if we need to follow 2x or 10x incidental lesions in the population, leads to cost and availability problems. A lymphoma patient in remission needs follow up scans too, and I don't want them to have to wait 3 months because thousands of people are now following up their benign adrenal adenomas.
If you could dramatically reduce cost and improve availability, would this still be a problem?
What's the limiting factor that prevents medical imaging from getting cheaper and more available?
The machines are expensive (millions range per MRI scanner), staffing the machines nearly around the clock with highly educated technologists, repair/maintenance of expensive specialized machinery, radiologists to read each scan (esp with a current shortage), means it’s very expensive to set up and run an imaging center. Opening and owning an imaging center used to be seen as fairly lucrative. and many radiology private practices did just that, however, the economics have changed over the years with dropping reimbursements, staffing shortages, etc and now often these imaging centers are seen as a liability rather than an asset.
I feel like the first part of this explanation reminds me of stories about mainframe computers in the 1950-70s - highly expensive special gear that needs special operators. Is there something about the physics of the process standing in the way?
Excluding the cost of X-ray/CT/MRI machines, operating them, getting people to them and through them, sometimes injecting contrast, and sometimes dealing with side effects of said contrast, radiologists, I think. You can scale all of the above except interpretation. AI is the natural next thought for how to scale that part, but it's been thought that this would happen any moment for over a decade.
This is definitely a part of standard follow up for small findings and part of the guidance for incidentally detected lung nodules smaller than <8mm.
I think mammography is a great example. Many people are quite surprised to hear that the Positive Predictive Value of a screening mammography is only in 10-15% range. This despite mammography being a pretty sensitive test. This is because despite good test performance characteristics, applied across a large population of relatively health people, the 2-5% false positive rate is a large number of people.
Statistically overdetection leads to poorer outcomes because interventions have a risk as well. That's why everyone doesn't get a yearly full body CT scan, for example. The current guidelines are based on optimizing for maximum good, and believe it or not some things are best not known about because the risk of dying from it is about the same as the risk of the treatment.
Because people discovering "Incidentalomas" will be too freaked out to wait "just to see how things develop".
Cost, time, and for things like CT's, trying to limit your radiation exposure
Couldn't have said it better.
> "Incidentalomas"
Good word for it. We were a bit worried about something that showed up my my mum's scans, as if an inoperable tangerine-sized lung tumour wasn't a big enough problem. It was a round dot about the size of a pea on her adrenal gland that lit up like crazy in contrast dye. Now, that as you probably know was a worry because oh shit, lymphatic system involvement, that's going to spread like crazy.
But after two years of immunotherapy, and about six years after being detected while the lung cancer is gone, the pea is still there, still as bright as ever, neither getting bigger nor smaller.
No-one is in a hurry to poke at it and see what it is, just in case that turns out to be a mistake.
89 this year and at least got to see her grandchildren start primary school, so good work from your lot and the oncologists!
Now I know it's an "incidentaloma" :-)
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.
The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.
I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?
Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.
I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes?
Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?
I think you (and others) are getting caught up in your own worse-case interpretation of the words of that statement, instead of looking at the intent of it.
It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".
I'm sorry, I do not take implied statements lightly in regards to medical.
The only relevant implication is the word “useful”. Clearly we want useful data, that’s obvious.
There is no indication that the data being sampled by midjourney is useful.
The root level comment is talking about their general vision of healthcare. We’re talking about ideal goals here.
Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.
The massive data gathering part should only be part of the learning phase of the system imo, once it get a good model of reality it should infer useful knowledge information from few data, like an expert.
Hard to say it's actually more useful data
Huh? You don't have to come up with an interpretation. The brief says it "looks a lot like today's MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed". They don't explain why having a hundred times as many MRI images would lead to better diagnostic outcomes. It is not like ultrasound scanning is a new idea, and they don't give any particular reason why this suggestion was not used before (other than "...data?")
It's not just about better diagnostic outcomes. Currently MRIs are a horrible, claustrophobic experience, and MRI machines are so insanely expensive that it is a bigger deal just to prescribe one.
So even if it is only as good as an MRI, or even 80% as good as an MRI, if it is much cheaper and much more pleasant to go through, you will get MORE people doing it, and get it prescribed in more situations.
That's at least how I read the benefits, democratization of imaging techniques rather than just improvement.
That is absolutely not what they meant. Do you really, honestly think they're that stupid?
I think they think we are that stupid.
No I don't. So why say it?
I think if we already had everyone wearing commercially available continuous glucose monitors and gathered and analyzed that data, we'd already have diagnosed and solved a lot of our most common health problems.
Obviously not all data is useful or meaningful, but even with the tech we already have, there's a ton of it that we're just not collecting or using.
This is a bit of a contrived example. The “megabytes per second per dollar” is clearly in reference to their scanner technology that the say generates terabytes worth of data, with the goal of a scan taking around 60 seconds. So I’m confused about exactly what your point is?
That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
If you don’t want then scan then carry on as usual.
The problem is that it's not clear how useful those terabytes of information are. Ultrasound is very good for certain types of imaging, but the contrast mechanisms available are very limited - super high resolution images of uniform intensity aren't useful. An imaging method isn't useful if it doesn't help you discriminate what you want to see from what you don't. The reason MR is so useful is that it has so many contrasts available (T1, T2, proton density, flow speed, diffusion coefficient, diffusion direction, chemical composition, tissue elasticity, BOLD activation, and many other more esoteric ones). In an hour long scan, even with rapid acquisitions, you usually only get a few gigabytes of data, but that data has a LOT of information about your tissue - that's the reason the scanner keeps starting and stopping and making different noises, it's taking MANY different types of images with complementary information.
I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.
I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.
> That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
This is deeply silly and nonsensical framing. You don't want "lots of data really fast", you want high-quality, diagnostically useful data. If the fastest way to generate that is via 15-minute MRIs, then that is vastly more ideal than a bullshit scan that takes seconds.
I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.
But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
It's funny because these criticisms are similar to the ones that Raymond Damadian faced when he was trying to develop the MRI. He was criticized for just being a doctor and not an NMR specialist, criticized for making bold claims based on the crude initial images that he presented, criticized for being too exuberant about the potential of the technology, criticized for only having a small group of non-expert graduate students and his own self-taught electronics and machining knowledge. He eventually founded his own company to commercialize the technology and even then he fought an uphill battle for 8 more years.
The criticism is also similar to those faced by Theranos. Survivorship bias is always a factor when looking backwards.
I think the only way you figure out which data has value is by collecting it first. And I don't trust pharma any more than I trust tech.
I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.
> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.
I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data.
Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?
I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.
In a more sane universe, we'd have been further along simply standardizing & centralizing patient records for providers, figuring out base rates, and communicating those base rates to providers.
> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have.
What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”
It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.
This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.
They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.
> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.
> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.
> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it
So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.
I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:
1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers
1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.
All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.
The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.
The synthetic doctor is raised on megabytes.
(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)
data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochondria, receptor shapes, expressed proteins, etc.). If this company was a bunch of biology grad students getting the AI bug, I'd be hopefully curious, but for a bunch of "generate images" folks to try to go back from low-res images to biology, seems a bit naive. Like not knowing how much DNA and RNA information there is in the body naive. I'm sure their leaders are good at financial engineering, but for effectively "proactively keeping you healthy", mmm, maybe not.
Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc.
As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.
I hope it doesn't proactively Xray me 5 times a day
It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.
Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.
We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit.
You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.
True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.
Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.
Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc.
The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.
That is a good point. There’s no point arguing about how well the map correlates with the territory… if the map isn’t even in your hands yet.
Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not.
Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
False positives are the primary issue. False positives lead to stress, invasive diagnostic procedures and wasted medical resources. Look into the debate about what is the appropriate age for mammographies and how Apple Watches have resulted in overdiagnosis of heart conditions.
For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.
Today only I'll sell you 6GB of data for 6000USD its a steal. Buy now.
> Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it.
As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment).
What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege.
Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
Even those annual blood tests can be problematic.
When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high.
A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist visits than before. A lot more tests. After months of that all of the scary things were eventually ruled out. And then the values went back to normal. Nobody has an explanation even now.
This is just with a pretty standard battery of tests: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH with reflex, vitamin D. They catch enough bad things that they're generally worth ordering on a regular basis for healthy people at annual physicals. The occasional wild goose chases like what happened with me is the price we pay for catching the more serious things.
I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I have 2 autoimmune disorders/diseases, and I have spent the last 2 decades managing them. One of them (thyroid) is relatively easy, take my synthetic thyroid hormones ever day, and check my levels every 3 months to make sure I'm still good. The other is symptom management, which is less consistent, and a flair up from one causes the other to flair as well. And flairs are particularly hard to handle and function well.
> I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.
Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.
Okay, you're worried about too much data and false positives, but that's a problem you can get around by smoking a pack a day and not going to the doctor. The vast majority of people on the planet have exactly zero hard data on their ailments, and even if they spend their life savings trying to get a clear picture they may never have one.
Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.
The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
If you ask people to rank say 5 things from top to bottom where the first thing at the top is what they are least cost conscious about and the one at bottom is what they are most - I would bet health would at the top slot for most of us. So relatively we would spend (whatever we have) on our health versus other things if we had conviction on the outcome.
"I want to be able to walk without pain but if it's gonna be expensive forget it!"
The best thing you can do for low cost is 1) eat better food and 2) move more
"More data" is quite literally irrelevant.
People don't do anything with the data they already have, to your point.
Stand on a scale at the same time of day, every day. Track your intake. Track your output. See your PCP for your free AWV-equivalent, and keep an eye on your metrics.
But no, we need GB of scanner outputs because some medically-illiterate (but still the smartest-guy-in-the-room) techbros want them for... reasons.
After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image.
"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.
That's like saying you don't care about the hundreds of kilobytes of your DNA biome you can obtains nowadays for nearly free, you care about being healthy.
My man, YOU USE THOSE bytes for that purpose exactly.
I want to give my money to actual individual doctors who studied this for a decade, have the work and life experience to make informed judgements and decisions to reason about my health. I dont want to pay a company to digitize my body and then sell the data back to me
> A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not
You want technology to train you how to avoid environmental factors and then give you treatment?
we're still very far away from eliminating humans in the loop from medicine.
>A) proactively keeping me healthy,
This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible
To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege.
Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.
Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?
I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.
This happens in a number of medical systems of countries across the world and is perfectly feasible, usually through premium subsidies for stuff like planned check ups, buying certain types of food and even installing equipment to monitor your driving behaviour. The thinking is that encouraging customers to be healthy reduces premium claims in the future
All I want is the safety that, if something is wrong, treating it won’t bankrupt me.
Everything you want in your desired healthcare system can be stored as data.
I have a mixed response:
1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.
2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.
3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.
4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.
Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.
The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.
I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.
So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.
On the “we don’t know what to do”, I think it’s cool that they are trying something medical with it. Success obviously isn’t assured, probably it isn’t even probable, but I’m happy to see companies try this rather than launch yet another whatever or start a consulting business. I hope as the field (AI generally) matures, more people decide to try life changing stuff with it.
> we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall
My opinion is that the money is in the verticals as the models and harnesses built around them become commodities. Specializing in a vertical, especially where hardware is involved, creates a buffer between companies and the frontier labs. The frontier labs are spreading themselves thin trying to capture verticals like finance or legal but aren’t narrow enough to be as competitive as a company that is going for a more targeted approach.
The branding choice is crazy to me. “Midjourney” is pretty much synonymous with “generated images that aren’t real”. Which is the opposite of what you want when it comes to medical imagery and data.
quite the opposite. it feels refreshing that ppl with talent and money can do inspiring things with it.
yeah. they could have called it Medjourney.
> “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.
this is pretty normal, i mean you have OpenAI and Anthropic trying the same as well. OpenAI is working on legal stuff [1] and also rolled out (or said they'll roll out) ChatGPT Health [2]. Then there was Sora etc.
These companies need applications for their tokens and someone has to build them. If they can win even with one, that's a net benefit for them no?
1 - https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/06/02/openai-targets-t...
2 - https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-health/
In a sea of AI products, the brand is still powerful though. Would I have clicked this if not for the Midjourney name? Probably not
The pivot to do things they want as AI research lab is perfectly understandable, but also..weird, like their loyal userbase are mostly creative people, and this pivot have ZERO things to do with those audience at all.
It also gives a vibe that they gives zero damn about to those creatives audience, or the things that made name for them in the past anymore, or that what I feel as their subscriber... I know that David Holz have his own unique way of doing things but it's still...weird!
oh, and the hypetrain on X. yikes..
to be fair I wouldn't call people operating AI Image generators creative people. At best they're people curious about the technology itself, anybody willing to learn and do it for the sake of being creative does it themselves.
I think you're romanticizing art generation a bit. A lot of it operates like a normal working job, there is no magic "truly creative genuis", a lot of working artists treat it as their jobs and if a tool helps them get their job done, it is helpful.
Not every creative profession is something where you create something you're proud of or you own. You're often just one part of a massive machine working on a project. It's a bit hard to keep sticking to the "creative noble artist" mythical vibe when it's a 9 to 5. And it's not fair to call them not creative just because you feel like it.
Both ”creative mythical noble artist” and ”creative work is just work” are unhelpful strawman arguments. One is elitist, the other is reductionist.
Creativity is neither a property of who you are or what you do. It’s about how you do it. It’s closer to a mindset of curiosity, wonder and play. For example, many programmers have a need for creativity within coding, but don’t feel they get it at their 9-5 job, and instead work a side project (like FOSS, indie game) because it’s a more creative experience. The point is: same person, same activity yet one is more creative than the other.
The art/artifact itself is not creative. It’s the process that’s creative. Building a car can be creative. Buying a car is not. That’s not romanticizing and gatekeeping people who don’t have time to build a car. It would be genuinely misleading to equate those things.
I don't understand your point. You say:
> Creativity is neither a property of who you are or what you do
Then you say:
> It’s closer to a mindset of curiosity, wonder and play.
Which has to be the property of what you do (the process) or who you are (the personality willing to embed those values), right?
> It’s the process that’s creative. Building a car can be creative. Buying a car is not.
Sure, but the process is "what you do" which directly contradicts what you're saying.
> For example, many programmers have a need for creativity within coding, but don’t feel they get it at their 9-5 job, and instead work a side project (like FOSS, indie game) because it’s a more creative experience.
Sure but most programmers don't do it. Simillarly many artists work on projects for companies and their own projects. My point is that you cannot reduce commercial work as not creative just because it's a 9-to-5.
I really fail to understand your point with this comment since it's not really saying anything coherent.
You also say
> The point is: same person, same activity yet one is more creative than the other.
Again, if that person is doing that activity then it is what they do i.e. you're calling the process creative. And in this case, we'll call that same person to be creative since they have the drive to work on their own project after a full 9-5 job. But if they were not doing it, we'll still consider them creative since it is a basic requirement at their 9-5. That is my point - both of them are creative. Degrees may vary depending on subjective perception but that was not what was being discussed.
> Sure, but the process is "what you do" which directly contradicts what you're saying.
”What you do” was just short for the _activity_ that you’re doing, eg ”I am coding” or ”I am building a car”, which does not determine the extent of how creative it is. Building ikea furniture from instructions would be low on the creative scale, whereas making a chair from woodworking might be higher, for most people.
> Sure but most programmers don't do [side projects]. My point is that you cannot reduce commercial work as not creative just because it's a 9-to-5.
Of course not, some people find that perfect match. That said, employment is not optimized for creativity, so it simply appears unusual that it’s conducive to highly creative work. This is my theory of why many programmers pick up hobbies outside of 9-5 where they have better preconditions, whether it’s side projects (same domain) or woodworking (different domain). Some find it at their 9-5, and some don’t feel much urge.
> we'll still consider them creative since it is a basic requirement at their 9-5. That is my point - both of them are creative. […] Degrees may vary depending on subjective perception but that was not what was being discussed.
I don’t think it’s even meaningful to discuss creativity without acknowledging that it’s both subjective and that degrees may vary. And yes, problem solving is probably always creative to some degree. But the degree is the important part.
So, I wouldn’t call _them_ creative or not, because again I don’t think it’s a personality trait nor binary. Only the person doing it can tell how creative it feels. Personally I felt mostly uncreative when doing corporate work. I would have loved for it to feel creative, but it didn’t.
This is just complete nonsense.
You really think creative people are not interested in new forms of visual expression?
This as simply being ignorant of art history.
From what I gather the hatred for AI among musicians and artists is pretty universal. I can only speak for myself. but for me and the way that I draw and make music AI can only replace, never complement my creative process.
Yeah, exactly. This would have been a cool side project company from the founder and team.
Doing it under their main brand is very weird and I don’t quite see how it translates to creatives at all.
This is somewhat speculative, but as I see it, there are two ways to retain excellent people:
a) You pay them handsomely
b) You do shit they like, they way the like.
Sometimes it overlaps, of course. But this is essentially the reason why people stay in academia in the hard sciences. Most of us could earn considerably more in industry.
I'm not sure midjourney can compete with the bigwigs on a). But doing healthcare stuff is probably more fulfilling to the researchers, and with less "we stole from all the artists" vibes.
Of course, if this all works out, they might me able to do a) easily :)
Personally, I think the bigger problem is successful individuals and companies deciding to just stick with their original business model and squeeze every drop of money out of it for their own personal enrichment.
God forbid someone should try to do things to benefit society with their fortune.
“To the man with a new hammer, all problems look like a nail.”
This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.
My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!
Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.
On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!
MRI physicist here as well. I have a basic understanding of ultrasound, and this looks like an array of transducers organized to perform tomography, just as CT did for Xray.
However Ultrasound quality depends highly on transducer-skin contact.
Any physicists here to comment on the effects of sonar through liquid and the effects on image resolution and field of view?
This is precisely why you do it in water - the water-skin contact is effectively perfect, as is the water-transducer interface, and the body of water is easily characterizable; in effect you are scanning one large object that consists of a body of water that just happens to have a human body in it, and then extracting the body from that scan.
This paper, “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography”, goes into more detail.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
Notably, the lead author on that paper was a visiting researcher at midjourney last year.
The water is a clever impedance matching trick. The contrast in density between air and human flesh is high, so the waves all reflect off the surface rather than penetrating and reflecting off the internal structures we care about.
That's why normally you're concerned with really good transducer contact (squeezing out any air) or use a gel to match impedance.
I'm a bit rusty on CT, but I'd guess the resolution is proportional to the total number of transducers in the array (e.g. larger sensing surface equals tighter resolution) since you're basically taking a Fourier transform of the incident wave.
Ultrasound researcher working on fast microvascular imaging here. Depends on the datarates, you can generally get pretty good blood flow data pretty fast, with <.5 seconds per slice if you do it with appropriate algorithms. A lot of this depends on motion though as you said, as the issue is generally getting a high-enough SNR (blood flow is generally 30-40 dB below tissue in energy, except for the biggest of vessels). Generally, higher frequencies have less of a separation between blood and tissue, but they have issue with attenuation. But I think with enough SNR (and with their element count that may indeed be possible), they could get pretty good blood flow data across the whole body.
I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive.
But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. But, at the same time, it is likely that it isn't a problem. And now, you will be stressed about the chance of having some health condition and spend time and money digging into a rabbit hole of what the issue could be, only to find out it was nothing.
They also don't say anything about the price of such a machine. If they really envision a future where everyone can easily get a scan, this is a crucial factor.
Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature?
I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.
Good question!
Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication.
To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is that you'll see lots of lumps and bumps growing, and this could lead to lots of invasive checks. You can't not check because that's not fair "here is something that looks like cancer, if we grab it now it will stop you needing chemo. But it could just be a cyst."
So, its really really expensive to have 100k people getting monthly full body MRIs for 10+ years. Even more expensive to get them at the right resolution.
I think, that if these scanners are good and that is _Very much_ not proven. Then having a long term study would be good. I however have deep misgivings about how effective field array ultrasonic scans are, also safety.
I also do not trust midjourney, a company that exists through large scale copyright infringement to handle that data safely, ethically or in a way that would allow decent science to be done from it.
The entire point of this machine seems to be to do non-invasive scans that don't have the type of side effects that constant CT scans would have and which are vastly cheaper and easier to do than MRI so that you can collect longitudinal data on any/all individuals.
Finding "lumps and bumps" or incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI, maybe your doctor would want a follow up MRI as a closer look but if it seems likely benign they could easily recommend you to just keep scanning with this ultrasound machine and only get another MRI or biopsy if it seems to develop in a malignant way.
The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief when it comes to the development of new medical technology. Many groundbreaking devices were developed through the efforts of individuals, including the MRI.
> The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief
the full body MRI was developed in the NHS/university along with CT scanners. But let us not pretend that modern companies have been acting in a way that is ethical. OR that there exists a legal framework that fights for the rights of normal people.
> incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI
They are a problem because we have no real data on cancer incidents that don't develop. (https://ima.org.uk/24626/making-sense-of-cancer-with-profess... buried in this article)
Biopsies are not risk free. General anaesthetic carries a risk. You'll be on antibiotics, the wound will have an infection risk. Also the build up of scar tissue is a real issue.
This is the ethical issue. Because suspicious lumps will need investigation, no ethics board is going to allow not investigating.
This also fucks up the data.
Its not impossible, but it needs sensible thought, thought from actual medical professionals, rather than a company who is at best operating in a legal grey zone.
We can and do full body scans. Typically in the context of research, or for focus/metastasis search in current clinical settings.
The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.
Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.
I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.
However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.
Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.
"the people can't be trusted with knowledge" is a bad argument
we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently
collect data passively. when a medical condition arises, you have a data source to correlate against the onset of the condition
currently we have almost no data, so doctors need to run multiple tests to identify possible causes
> we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently
So your take is we just do the testing and ignore it's outputs entirely, until something comes up? And that is somehow different and better than current imaging processes?
> currently we have almost no data
This is absolute fucking nonsense.
my take is simply three points
1/ telemetry is operationally useful in systems engineering 2/ the human body is a system 3/ this is a step towards telemetry for the human body
> currently we have almost no data
this is accurate. ordinary people might get blood drawn once per year. that is almost no data, relative to a monthly or weekly full-body ultrasound
I understand the argument but imagine if it were applied to other nascent technologies like the microscope, which incidentally was also viewed with suspicion by doctors who (accurately) cited flaws in early models such as chromatic and spherical aberration. Thankfully, many people persisted in developing it including non-medical polymaths like Robert Hooke. I recognize this may cause some headaches for doctors dealing with insistent patients but I doubt it will be a permanent problem as the technology develops further and becomes more widespread.
I think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.
Isn’t that a similar argument against AI?
Sorry, I don't get your point.
Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.
> Over treatment can be a real problem.
Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.
For me?
If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise.
And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors.
Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off.
I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.
You won’t know they are benign unless you plan on a biopsy or surgery for every finding. It’s exactly this reason why we only regularly scan people that have say, known cancer.
They'll know whether they're getting bigger or not. Pretty much the same for if you have a lump just under your skin that you can see and feel but this would allow you to see the ones further inside. So you just have to take the same attitude and advice towards them that a doctor would give you about the surface level lumps. What's the difference?
And for what? Is it just morbid curiosity or is there something you plan to do with that information.
It’s right there in their second line
But from what this says, it's not accurate enough to determine benign vs cancerous lumps
Just to add to this. My heart pumps blood in a known but different way than normal. I know because, to practice sports in my home country, it is required to undergo a specific checkup that includes an ECG. However, despite doing that visit many times, only two doctors ever mentioned this condition. The reason is that it causes no issue at all, so they just don't want to worry people for nothing by telling them their heart is pumping in a different way than most other people.
I would rather know that than have the information hidden from me. It's also not hard to imagine a scenario where such quirks are harmless on their own, but might be relevant in the future or for reasons the doctor is missing. I guess it's true some people would panic at any sort of quirk they find, but I find that frustrating as someone that doesn't think that way.
Further, as someone that has spent far too much time and money trying to find the root cause of a particular issue (with absurdly frustrating inefficiencies in terms of being bounced around, insurance nonsense, etc), I am generally in favor of improving our ability to find a lot of information in a manner like this. Doctors are generally good at finding very common issues they see all the time, much worse at anything uncommon. This can be a real problem. I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases, we might find a lot of issues that were hard to catch without that scale of information. I also think preemptive scanning would catch a lot of issues that go otherwise unnoticed for much longer than they should go, something that also happened to me, but is mostly an issue of systemic inefficiencies in our current healthcare system rather than something that this technology is required to solve. In my case, doing some simple checks that they felt weren't necessary because I seemed healthy would've caught it much earlier.
> I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases
Was this presented as an opportunity for researchers to be able to run more large scale studies involving full scans I woukd have a different take. This is however presented as a shiny toy to be put in a spa, that gives you images you don't know how to interpret anyway, or at best gives you some AI-powered report.
The rest that you're saying points more to issues of you country's Healthcare system, and it isn't clear if and how this technology would improve that.
> Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it?
Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.
Because a lot of things showing up in scans you wont know what is until you cut them out or do a biopsy. And even then you might never know if that thing would have progressed to become a problem. Scanning more will not solve that.
Realistically this data is going to be used to train a closed source model, not to contribute to the scientific literature.
Overdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that.
Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.
Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.
This seems like something MLB teams would install in their locker rooms if it works.
I agree, hopefully it becomes just like any other cheap and easy measurement like blood pressure. Most of the time, small changes and variations will be determined to be normal but having a record and a measurement allows you to determine what is abnormal or a symptom of a disease. It's the difference between having a measurement and having nothing at all (if you never got a scan with CT or MRI).
If this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?
I thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that.
https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-...
> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
those scans are one-off events, these scans are regular
the signal is improved by focusing on differences over time, instead of looking for insight from a single snapshot
in a production system, I look at the change log around incident start as one high signal way to diagnose the problem
I want the same ability with my own body. new pain? look for recent scan deltas, in conjunction with modern medical intuition
We already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things.
Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?
“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.
Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.
MedLifeCrisis the youtube channel has a great video [1] on why you shouldn't full body scan. He's a consultant (highest level of doctor) in the NHS in England (and has done a PhD and research as is common in the UK medical system).
[1]: https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8
> chances are that the scan will show something unusual
Something unusual in a single one-off scan vs something unusual and changing over the course of multiple scans give two different views.
The main potential of this technology is that it's easy and fast, unlike classic MRIs. So someone could do a scan a month without a problem.
I learned this from watching House. I am certain that it's true, but I also kind of wonder how much backpressure there is against this kind of thing because the scanners are also insanely expensive to run per minute.
This backpressure is even with cheaper devices such as x-rays etc.
The backpressure on x-rays is because dosing yourself with radiation on a regular basis is a really great way to generate health problems in the course of trying to find some. There's a reason x-ray operators and anyone in the room with the patient get given lead lined aprons to wear while the machine is active.
"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook.
Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good.
I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.
I understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.
This is exactly why it's a bad idea. I agree that if this technology comes to fruition, it should be in every clinical and research setting as a tool for us to further our understanding.
It shouldn't be a commodified test anyone can do at any time they feel like it. There are so many examples this leading to over or misdiagnosing already. I've seen patients who thought they had diabetes because they got a CGM over the counter and it showed a blood sugar spike during exercise (as in, their body doing exactly what it was supposed to do). He also now avoids oatmeal because "it spikes my blood sugar". Surprise: reddit and tiktok are awash with such stories as well.
I've seen a patient who on a whim decided to get 24hr blood pressure monitoring done, and thought they have severe hypertension because their systolic reached 170 when they were climbing stairs and during a football match because they were cheering and shouting.
In a similar vein, there are shady practicians who offer full body MRI scans, and fMRI brain scans to the well-to-do as a way of diagnosing things, when in fact neither are specific enough to actually diagnose something on their own.
23andme tests sending patients into clinics because they found a specific SNP that may be associated with worse outcomes for a disease.
We have neither the resources nor a specific enough technology (scan shows something: not specific enough to tell us what it is, but it sure is something) to unleash these for the general population to use.
Understood; these are the failure modes of cheap, weak tests in a system designed for expensive, high signal tests. I get that it is causing a real pain when these are introduced willy-nilly -- so is there a way for the medical system to evolve into making productive use of such signals?
Because the status quo is not working for a lot of folks in managing their own health, and just saying "it has to be this way" --while every other aspect of their life takes advantage of a wider range of options -- leaves them careening into MAHA style crazyness .
>> But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan.
People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!
Another reason is that we don't actually know what negative effects regular "scans" might have.
Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.
As crude as it sounds, you don't know until you try.
SOTA ultrasound devices are still very expensive, with e.g. a custom 3D probe with a few hundred piezo elements costing well over 10k. IF they want to use MEMS probe instead of piezo (which is implied by them saying that they will use a chirp), that's going to be even more expensive, considering the lack of manufacturing know-how. When sufficiently scaled, I wouldn't say it is an exorbitant price for large research hospitals, but I am a little skeptical of rolling these out as a health checkup "spa" service outside of areas with extreme wealth concentration (e.g., Silicon Valley? Sure. London? Yeah; Minneapolis? not so sure.)
I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.
Agreed, If you look for issues, you'll find them.
Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).
In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).
I'm grateful that modern science can monitor and predict such issues, even if in the end there's no problem. The alternative, as we know for thousands of years without modern health care, is far worse for women giving birth.
I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too heartbreaking.
Sure, but in this case, there was a good reason for the additional tests: a high-risk pregnancy. And still, the outcome was stress for nothing. Now, imagine thousands of perfectly healthy people doing full-body scans every week just because they can. This actually carries the risk of jamming real health care, because those perfectly healthy people will undergo additional clinical tests for nothing.
Imagine all the data that gets us towards those scans actually being meaningful. Don't treat them like scans to find problems but scans to learn from, collectively.
As I wrote in replies to other similar comments, this would be the case if this technology was presented as an opportunity for researchers to run more large-scale studies. This isn't however the case, it is instead presented as a shiny toy for fancy spas.
So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).
On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.
EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.
[0]https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
> femtometer resolution
The diameter of a carbon atom is 154 picometers. Nobody's going down into the femtos. And you're not going to get atomic resolution, either, because humans move around too much and things like scanning electron microscopes need very stationary samples. Even microscopic vibrations can blur the final image.
Which isn't to say that you couldn't get very good resolution...
Just for illustration: Gravitational wave detection is on the femtometer scale. The proton is about that size. We can measure these things, but the machines are, let's say, "big".
Sigh...
LIGO detects length changes of 10^-18 m, or attometers, not femtometers, which are a thousand times longer. (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts) But this does not matter at all, because this is not resolution of the body image, but the size of the vibration on the speaker. That's a technical data point that I don't see any reason to include in this presentation other than to cause this exact confusion.
The video looks in general like it's trying to impress by giving a lot of incidental information about how the device works while being very light on what it would be able to actually see -- e.g., it doesn't matter how many gigabytes your device collects if the resulting image is blurry.
Compare the website of LIGO (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts), which also has a lot about the technical marvels (huge vacuum tubes! precision engineering!) but crucially includes the goal of this all.
"I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in <1 minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine."
https://x.com/SebastianCaliri/status/2067452733356122303
I can't see how ultrasonic tomography can actually get anywhere near the resolution or penetrative depth that MRI can have.
Also The other thing I am unsure of is what the health effect of dumping you into an industrial scale ultrasonic cleaner. For example you can have doppler to measure blood flow in real time, but you can't do that for early pregnancy because of some health reason or other.
I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit.
Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of the Theranos hysteria.
The X post is obviously biased, but I couldn't spot any obvious scientific mistakes in the actual announcement video.
Someone else linked to this preprint which seems related [1]. Would you take a look and say whether it seems legitimate?
[1] Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
The authors report explicitly state that the system's resolution does not match clinical CT or MRI. The elevational resolution is 15–25mm, meaning each slice is effectively a thick 2D section rather than the fine isotropic 3D volume MRI provides. MRI also delivers far richer soft-tissue contrast; this device produces only three contrast types (reflectivity, speed of sound, attenuation), and because it uses a low 1MHz frequency, the reflection images come primarily from tissue boundaries rather than from internal tissue texture.
I could see this being valuable for adipose tissue mapping or fatty-liver monitoring at a large scale, as the machines would be significantly cheaper, but this isn't some revolutionary magic bullet like the Twitter post is insinuating.
As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.
For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip.
Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passive, as in MR elastography (most common), where the patient wears a transducer pad, and vibration is actively generated by a driver. You've then got algorithmically-passive, which is more analogue to passive sonar, reconstructing tissue stiffness from ambient broadband vibration without the emitted probing pulse, but that is very much entirely academic. I guess the question would be, why is it worth pursuing when you have something like optical coherence elastography (OCE) for non-invasive profiling. Doing it using noisy ultrasound method becomes redundant. There are other methods, but the outcome is the same.
Generally (this is true for all systems, not just humans) you need to induce energy into it to more effectively measure it's output. Think of it like a bell - if I want to hear the note it produces, it's much easier to hear what this is if I ring it with a hammer. Granted, it will be "passively" resonating to a point where, with a sensitive enough sensor, I could probably pick up the output without the hammer - but that is a pointless problem to solve. I could hit a bell with a soft hammer a million times over without causing damage to it. The lifetime of the person hitting it with a hammer is far shorter than the accumulative damage to the bell before it breaks. The same is true for humans. You could effectively run a very low-energy, 60Hz vibration through a person (which is how the pads work) for multiple lifetimes before it would cause significant damage, so there comes little point in solving that problem. As such, true "passive" imaging is functionally pointless if your outcome is "safely image a patient". You're overengineering your solution to solve a problem that is only relevant if your patient was planning on living for 1000+ years.
I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.
The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.
My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.
What does PE mean?
private equity
> Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own
Is it? Linear No Threshold has largely been rejected at this point. https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed....
We have no evidence in favor of the linear no threshold model. That is not the same as saying that we have evidence against it.
There is some evidence for hormesis - but yes no model is proven right now. LNT is the most conservative model and part of why it sticks around.
A good primer: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2477686/
LNT does also damage, as people refusing necessary CT scans or countries switching of nuclear power because of fear.
Sure but we don’t prove negatives for a reason - it’s impossible. We assume the null hypothesis.
LNT is the null hypothesis. No one disagrees a linear model fits the data very well in high doses. If you want to argue that model doesn't work in low doses, you need a model with more parameters and sufficient data to fit it. The issue is that, at these low doses we want to differentiate, we're also looking at effect sizes that are hard to separate from noise, and sampling biases that are hard to erase. There's still lively and ongoing debate.
Well problem is that humans are so noisy through lifestyle, enviroment and genes that any proof for either is really hard.
Another problem is that there haven't been natural experiments in low dose exposures the way there unfortunately have been for high dose exposures.
Your link does not support, and in fact refutes, your claim
Weekly CTs are going to give you cancer
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place (https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry...).
The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
>Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
I don't think "someone used their tool to produce a silly result and used it" qualifies as Midjourney having questionable history at all.
> The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output.
And the safety of the data as well. Am I supposed to entrust full body scans to a startup?
From my understanding of the post, the waves that are created are smaller than light waves, and there's no evidence that light waves, sound waves or sub-sonic waves have any aneurysm-causing effects.
(I researched more and found in the video a value) The waves are 50 nanometres, and this is basically the equivalent of having a full body ultrasound. We've been doing baby ultrasounds for decades with no ill effects, so I can't imagine this being different
Ultrasonic wavelengths are orders of magnitude longer than light.
We already ultrasound babies in the womb, so one would hope this has been studied.
Before ultrasound, they used to x-ray pregnant women to see the fetus. At that time, someone might have said "one would hope this has been studied"... unfortunately that practice went on for about 60 years before being stopped in the late 1950s.
Side note: kinda crazy they had medical x-rays in the 1890s. X-Ray imaging was discovered in 1985 and used clinically within 2 years.
But I do agree with your point, these days, I hope we're better about studying the potential dangers of current technologies we use.
We also used to x-ray people for shoe fitting/for lulz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
We also put lead in paint and gas because why the fuck not? Asbestos pretty much everywhere because it was a miracle material, etc. for decades, and we're still paying the price
> But I do agree with your point, these days, I hope we're better about studying the potential dangers of current technologies we use.
Sorry, but this is just pure "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" vibe to me. I mean, you've just brought up a perfect example yourself! What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to still hope that this time it's not like that?
I don't wanna start the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing and whatnot, and surely you shouldn't avoid ultrasound just because of irrational fear of some yet undiscovered side-effects, but it's really amazing, how people tell fun stories about how common was the narrative about major war being very unlikely in "modern days" (because who would dare to do that with this kind of technology!) right before WW1, and then conclude with firmly believing that these days (after WW2) it sure won't happen, because humans are not that dumb. And my point is, that perhaps it indeed might have been a bit less likely, if people didn't believe that it is so unlikely to keep stepping on the same rake.
that's not a video render of a hypothetical device, that's a real video of the real working device, fwiw
> the real working device
Could you expand on the term "working"? Do you mean like "working to slowly lower a person into water while videos of animated Figma UIs play back on a monitor?" Or do you mean some crazy kind of "working", like "the ring of devices we see are scanning the organs of the woman we see and the images appearing on the monitor are those just-captured organ scans?"
It's just a render? Where's the video?
The first video appears to be real. Who knows if it's a working prototype or just a mockup, but the fact that it's held together by C-clamps and other stuff you could get at Home Depot makes me lean towards the former. If it was purely for marketing they'd probably make it look more polished.
> The first video appears to be real
The video is clearly from Midjourney /s
The first video has the actual device (whether it's functioning or not) and the second video is a render.
This reeks of peak bubble, it’s ok say that.
> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop.
You have to hire an army of expensive compliance people (cheap ones aren't nimble enough for startups), develop the whole thing start to finish under strict design controls, and usually throw a lot of time and capital into convincing regulators your very innovative and disruptive new R&D endeavor is actually derivative enough to draft behind some existing medical device.
For reference, OP is talking about the 510(k) process. One of the issues with that process is that an approved medical device may end up with a whole tree of "derivative" devices approved through the 510(k) process. If that original device is then found to have problems and has its approval removed, those derivative devices do not also become unapproved.
That may be true, but the FDA is no longer run by fiduciaries of the United States.
Just grease the right tanned palms, and you're good to go!
do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong
this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today
You can't have any impact at all if you can't legally operate it or if you are hamstrung in your marketing claims.
Chatgpt is just words. This is an ultrasound imaging system. Who knows what could go wrong: blown out eardrums from feedback, acoustic burns, wild inaccuracies that lead to misdiagnosis.
There's really no way around documentation as a way of collecting evidence that the team knows what they are doing. Things like enumerating all the possible patient risks, assessing their severity, updating the design to mitigate, and ultimately testing that it works as intended.
This is why you can't just bolt on the medical device part. Most devs will have a conniption if suddenly expected to attend lots of meetings and do a lot of paperwork. Different skillset and very expensive to switch out your whole workforce.
Let's say you do a diagnostic based on the results of this machine. Later, patient suits and you have to answer for your diagnostic. If the only evidence for your diagnostic is coming from a non-FDA approved machine, you're liable.
It needs approval from someone to ensure it's safe first and foremost - health & safety inspections, hygiene, FCC approval, etc.
And FDA approval (I presume) if they want to give formal diagnoses, but I believe that if they don't get that it'll fall under the "alternative medicine" umbrella, which is very broad. But they can do whatever under that umbrella as long as it's safe.
I wonder how doctors feel about people consulting ChatGPT. I know a doctor who can't stand people getting medical advice from quacks on TikTok, but that's probably a different problem/pattern
Since they hated Google I'm sure they also hate chatgpt.
Mostly they hate patients who have opinions
It sounds like they are trying to fly under the FDA thresholds for regulation as a medical device and be considered a low risk "wellness device" which makes no medical diagnostic claims and has low risk. This is why it is in spas and not doctor's offices.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
> FDA may consider certain products that use non-invasive sensing (e.g. optical sensing) to estimate, infer, or output physiologic parameters (e.g. blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood glucose, heart rate variability) to be general wellness products when such outputs are intended solely for wellness uses, and provided they:
• are non-invasive and not-implanted;
• do not involve an intervention or technology that may pose a risk to the safety of users or other persons if specific regulatory controls are not applied;
• are not intended for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, prevention, or treatment of a disease or condition;
• are not intended to substitute for an FDA-authorized, cleared, or approved device;
• do not include claims, functionality, or outputs that prompt or guide specific clinical action or medical management; and
• do not include values that mimic those used clinically unless validated (e.g. manufacturer testing, peer-reviewed clinical literature) to reflect those values
This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.
It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.
More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.
Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.
This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.
Exactly, try can get a very limited FOV which is probably why they showcased it on arms/legs first
> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.
What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.
The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.
So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
> it's _git gud_
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk
The false positive rate is the entire risk.
When you go to the doctor for a physical they don't run all of the blood tests they can. They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
Some tests have been removed from routine exams, or at least discouraged, because they were producing more false positives and harm than what they were saving.
Full body scans are deep on the end of the spectrum of tests with high false positive rate when ordered without supporting symptoms. That's the risk.
> People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
Not really how it works in real life. When you get a full body scan, especially with ultrasound, there are a lot of benign things that can show up that vaguely look like non-benign things. Even if the interpretation is "probably nothing", many people start worrying and think they need to get more tests just to be safe. Even people who don't see themselves as "armchair physician" will start thinking that they should at least rule out the worst case because they wouldn't want to die of cancer having known that something might have been there.
They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
True to some extent, but you're ignoring the role that costs and insurance play here. Do you really think the personal physicians of billionaires and heads of state are only running a limited set of blood work because they're worried about false positives?
Yes.
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
But does it also catch more issues early?
Rarely.
More often it leads to people thinking they have issues when they don't.
The same thing happens with blood tests: You can order all the blood tests you want if you're willing to pay for them. If you order enough, you will get some that show up as abnormal. You can start spending tens of thousands of dollars ruling things out and never catch any real issues.
I’d want to see the data, and even if you had 10x the rate of false positives (to true positives) that resulted in unnecessary tests and procedures, it still could be worth it, depending on the severity of what you avoided with the testing.
> I’d want to see the data
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Go right ahead!
lol, hilarious.
I actually don't think we have the data available that I want, and even if we do, as many others here have pointed out, intentionally sticking our heads in the sand forever makes no sense.
> lol, hilarious.
> I actually don't think we have the data available that I want
I get the sense you haven't looked...
> intentionally sticking our heads in the sand forever makes no sense.
Because you make statements like this instead of citing the extensive literature on this question.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
Why do you do it at all?
Many countries with far better outcomes don’t do this, is it necessary, or is it just the product of an insurance-driven health industry which prioritises interventions over health?
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low
Regardless of how accurate a test is, by Bayes Theorem if it's done on enough healthy people the false positives will swamp the true positives.
Maybe there is a bias for action within our moral and legal system. Fundamentally if you can deal with uncertainty correctly or "perfectly" wouldn't more information always be better?
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
Isn't the way we decide what justifies intervention by comparing observational data, action and outcomes? Currently our observations are limited by many things including the cost and side effects. More frequent or better observations will improve the assessment of what justifies interventions.
That sounds more like a capitalism issue, to be honest. Treatment = revenue, so of course there will be unscrupulous individuals who will bend their oath and let patient anxiety drive care.
The trick seems like it would be to strongly incentivize waiting and watching any symptomless anomalies if further investigation is invasive. If you're getting 60 second scans every month then something growing will be catchable and something static or that disappears can be ignored until the next scan.
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
That's not how the legal system works, though.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
This is fair, but I think it's better stated as you did than couched in language suggesting it's a matter of principle.
No one is saying that we should stop looking. Especially not the commenter you replied to. They're saying the tech Midjourney presented isn't _gud_ enough to justify frequent scanning.
Consider the null space of diagnostic markers, say, the precise shape of a tissue boundary used in early cancer diagnoses that comes out blurry in an imaging system every time. More scans with the same null space will not resolve the null space.
> This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
Exactly this. I mean, even if the scan is really indeterminate, at a minimum you can simply wait, then scan again. If it's truly something serious, it will become determinate at some point. Doing this is still better than nothing and carries no risks of unnecessary procedures.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
This. The solution to all these "but what about spurious results" arguments is pretty obvious: Wait for some time, scan again, compare the results. We currently can't do this only because the required frequent scans are not cheap enough to do it en masse, so the scanning demands for masses of spurious results would overwhelm the system. Once cheap scanning (and actually good AI interpretation) becomes ubiquitous, this ceases to be an issue.
I love how people wait for some kind of technological God or magic silver bullet to """cure""" them, but when it comes to eating clean, exercising, not sitting 8 hours in front of a fucking screen every single day, getting good sleep, and all the other low hanging fruits you can act on right now, it's radio silence even though it would solves the majority of health issues
> ... It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. > ... Together they act as both a choir and an audience
I think I'm not the target audience. I guess they are going to need to sign up a lot of people, to train on their scans + their medical outcomes. So the article is talking to people who will get enthused by it, which is more difficult after the question of 23AndMe data sale.
I’m a weirdo who vaguely enjoys my MRIs. I’m moderately claustrophobic, but they still don’t really bother me. And I love the warming feeling that makes me feel like I’m getting microwaved.
What warming feeling? An MRI shouldn't really make you feel warm unless they're pushing IV contrast.
You can definitely feel it in your body, I mean you have metals in you. I definitely feel tingling and general sense of something nearly touching my skin and insides.
My understanding was that your body was absorbing some amount of whatever electromagnetic stuff passes through you for the image. And the techs have told me it’s nothing to worry about.
MRIs are so much cooler than that. https://www.radcommons.org/residents/files/physics/MRI_Made_... is a good read.
I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors).
With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).
This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.
I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").
It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.
I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.
Exactly - I had switched to a one meal per day setup and have been mostly following it for a few years.
Then after a routine “heart health” check all my indicators were super out of whack - the doctors thought I was on my deathbed - but I am perfectly happy pain free, in shape, physically active person…
Then _i myself_ had to dig into all these tests and figure out that they were measuring the wrong thing - since they try to time where your body is “just about to eat after a fast” - normally for most people in the morning before breakfast, but since my first meal of the day is usually around 20:00 - my body had adopted to have higher levels of various things just to stay on top of my lifestyle choices.
Anyway I had to educate some doctors since they haven’t really had a case like mine, so they weren’t thinking critically of how to interpret the results…
I imagine an automated test _could_ take these things into account with large enough dataset, but it would need to do a lot more reasoning than statistical correlation.
I do believe current sota models should be good enough to come to the correct conclusions with the right harness though.
Reminds me that a few years ago my wifes grandfather (80+) was wondering if he should cut back on the amount of exercise he was doing. He would regularly be knocking on our door at 6am to see if one of us would want to got for a quick 10k run or to hit the gym.
He was a firefighter in NY in his youth and had never stopped exercising even after retirement.
He went to his GP explained his workout routine and was basically told there is no precedent for it as people his age tend to not be running 10km a day. In short he was told if you're not in pain or fatigued keep at it.
I think he's nearly 90 now and has cut back the running to only a day or so a week, but last time we went to visit he was in his garage bench pressing 50kg
What parameters were higher than expected? The critical ones, glucose, electrolytes, lipids should stay low when fasting.
Sorry to branch out: How does this one meal per day work for you? There is recommended calories for a person, do you have to follow it somehow to make sure you have enough energy and exercise?
I just eat double portion at dinner, and then nibble on snacks before bed - I haven’t had breakfast in decades, then since I moved to India, with the carby nature of the food it was hard to stay in shape with 2 meals, so I decided to try and skip the lunch too. With fun work it is actually quite easy, and babysitting 4 claudes and helping out colleagues is very entertaining.
Now I either do gym before dinner (heavy exercise) or social dance after.
I’ve been given a lot of advice how I “should” be structuring it - like “don’t eat too much before bed” or “never eat before exercise” … but I haven’t had any issues with what I’m doing so far (~2 years)
One meal ... many snacks?
If the current state is anything to go by, an automated test would not only flag your out of distribution results but try to gaslight everyone reading its output with additional false indicators to map you into an area that's in distribution. Statistical models cannot accept the existence of extremely rare edge cases.
Modern LLMs routinely beat human doctors at diagnosing "extremely rare edge cases".
They have unmatched breadth of knowledge by default, and can maintain attention across entire medical histories.
Citation very much needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1iz4iwm/chatgpt_is...
or
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1oesnix/chatgpt_di...
or if you prefer from this site,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171639
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999632
If you were looking for a published paper or something more official though, I don't have one.
anecdotes aren't citations.
Maybe something that isn't completely censored anecdata? At best these fall into "well known diseases with obvious symptoms that overworked, incompetent, or simply sexist, human doctors missed" and not actual rare cases.
> Modern LLMs routinely beat human doctors at diagnosing "extremely rare edge cases".
There is a selection bias here. Not saying it wouldn’t work, but right now you hear about exceptional cases, not when the LLM wants to amputate for a wart.
We all work with LLMs, right? It hasn’t been long at all since an LLM gaslit me while attempting to recover an unbootable laptop. I should have been recommended a few simple steps to try; instead, it was unable to ignore the irrelevant details and led me on an hours-long chase. To me that means the LLM will also struggle to ignore irrelevant medical information.
If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
But we would have great data over time, both individually (weird tends to only matter if they are changing) and as a population.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Are people really going to perform invasive procedures over mere concern if there are no symptoms and the doctor recommends against it?
People take horse dewormer against COVID so yes they will do all kinds of irrational things
Oh we're still doing the "horse dewormer" thing despite 250 million humans taking it each year?
Yes, because it's nonsense and those 250m humans need to get off Twitter.
250M people take it as an anti-parasitic, as they should.
There are numerous comments here from experienced people addressing this. Yes, that happens and a doctor who dismisses the concern can be sued for malpractice if something actually does show up, so they are put in a difficult position. For some reason you just assume that doctors will recommend against an invasive procedure when there is a positive tomography result.
Review the numerous comments that address this as a statistical issue -- which it very much is when talking about the scale that Midjourney is claiming.
It's worse then that unfortunately. Even when invasive tests are positive, and we think we caught a cancer early, we know from population statistics that the reality is that often nothing would have happened. So we don't even truly know how to tell a cancer that will kill you from one won't. And we don't really know what it is that we don't know.
This is more true for some cancers then other though. Prostate, breast, and maybe melanoma are the worst in this regard. This is why prostate and breast cancer screening programmes are controversial, although the needle is swinging towards them being more useful as surgeries and treatments get better. Some other cancers like pancreatic cancer will always kill you eventually, so it's always good to catch them. It's a nuanced problem.
This whole issue is called "overdiagnosis", and personally I used to be obsessed with it. Being aware of it mostly caused a lot of hand wringing and grief, it's just easier to believe that every cancer you catch is a good thing. However, one of the broader issues is that we will never know what we don't know if we don't look. So there exists another perspective that all the suffering caused by overdiagnosis will eventually pay off in the long term. This is the "collect all the data for science/AI" perspective, and I've personally tentatively adopted it myself, although perhaps that's just because it's nicer to believe that you do some good even when you do harm. I think it's more likely that [novel cancer therapies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7) will solve the "harm" part of treatment before we solve overdiagnosis.
The reality is that important breakthroughs are often entirely unrelated to the data for you are collecting, and even worse that possibly helpful data is locked away due to regulation and never used. This is kinda why I've come to make some kind of peace with private clinics scamming people with whole body MRIs, as I'm sure they're secretly selling the data which might lead to some good. However, they would probably do even more good if they didn't exist so they didn't jack up the prices for MRI machines by inflating demand. The marketing they do is the most morally reprehensible part of the whole deal, as it's usually just lying and creating health anxiety for profit. The fact that midjourney here is marketing themselves in this direction is giving me some serious Theranos vibes. Quick and cheap MRI equivalents would be really useful in the clinic, and it would have to spend a few decades there to prove it is useful before moving on to the "spa" stage. That they are trying to market a render of an idea directly to the wellness crowd firmly puts this in the "scam" folder for me. The fact that midjourney is mostly irrelevant now also fits well with this, making it likely that this is either a marketing stunt or a desperate pivot to get funded. Hopefully there are not that many suckers who will put their VC money down on this loosing bet.
Maybe it would end up fine “in the long run” but you cannot ignore the significant issues arising at the beginning (and at each release of a more performant tool): what do you do if you find something that “shouldn't be there".
With enough data, it might change our idea of what shouldn’t be there. Like an appendix. But personalized!
That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say “in the long run” the problem comes in the meantime (and no, I don't think people in the present should endure bad things because it's going to make the future better).
Without clear hypotheses you will have a lot of false positives. Which are quite costly in healthcare.
Overdiagnosis will be a major problem long after we have the data.
It's just hard convince people with a general feeling something's wrong and a specific picture of something wrong that the two are almost certainly unconnected.
How do you measure the body regularly without potentially introducing problems just by measuring it?
My understanding is that both MRIs and ultrasounds do not introduce problems.
MRIs by themselves no, but depending on what you want to actually see you need to inject a contrast agent which is probably not something you want to do too frequently.
Good point, I was not thinking about MRIs with contrast.
Nobody is proposing this though
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
If you think the premise and conclusion of Op's statement form a tautology then you agree with him strongly.
All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.
The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.
Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety
You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it
Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket
Yeah I'm wondering where exactly people think we'd find the millions of additional MRI machines and technicians to run them to make this somehow viable, as if the current ones are not pretty much at 100% capacity at all times.
MRI machines cost in the six figures [0], last 10+ years and could reasonably do thousands of full-body scans a year. That's basically free by healthcare standards. Rent for the room to put it in would cost more in most cities.
MRI operators are specially trained technicians, because these are complicated machines. But like, semi trucks and photocopiers are fantastically complicated machines, and we seem to be able to keep a pipeline of people trained to operate and maintain them.
So I don't think there's an economic blocker for giving everyone a full-body MRI scan every year or two.
[0] https://www.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/mri-machine-cost-and-...
What are you reasonably expecting to find in a full body MRI? Besides the notion that a "full body MRI" is not a procedure that is routinely done anyway and lasts upwards of an hour. It's not the scanner that is the limiting economic factor.
Right. I'm replying to the commentator who questioned how we could possibly purchase and staff enough MRI machines to give people regular full body scans.
I'm saying there's no question that would be economically viable. The reason we don't and shouldn't do it is that it wouldn't be medically valuable, even compared to other cheap interventions.
The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session.
TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".
Conventional ultrasound scanners are already cheap. Why can't a big ultrasound scanner be cheap too?
What makes MRI machines expensive is that they are big helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have to be continuously kept at a few Kelvin.
As others are saying in these comments, MRI machines themselves aren't particularly expensive machines on a per-scan basis, to the extent the machines themselves are often left underutilised.
But even if you disregard that, there's this:
Other than the structure reading like an AI wrote it, the content also reads like someone who believes in homeopathy and invested in Juicero wrote it. Or hyperloop, where a believer could say paraphrase you and say "Conventional [trains] are already cheap. Why can't a [fast train in a vacuum tube] be cheap too?".Note this does not mean I think the hardware proposed here is totally impossible*. Sure you could make an ultrasound scanner. Why not? But then, hyperloop was always physically possible, just never turned out to be a good idea to actually build**.
* That said, I am suspicious about the claim in the video "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom - not micrometers or nanometers but picometers!", which does sound impossible to me given the movement of atoms is the sense field itself, albeit I'm not an expert in this domain and may just be wrong like how there's weird tricks for photolithography smaller than the wavelength of light used.
** Back when hyperloop was taken seriously and I was still looking for genius behind things Musk said, I thought hyperloop was an excuse to develop here on Earth a transport system that for a Mars colony made more sense than cars and roads (and indeed I still think that, just there's no evidence Musk ever did).
Maybe it's not a coincidence an AI company is building this thing...
That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service. And, as someone said before, the huge amount of data it produces, would decrease the rate of false positives to zero in no time! And your arguments about hypochondriacs are very similar to those that were once given against teaching reading to all people!
> That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service.
I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.
It's more statisticians saying this, and not doctors per se. You run into issues of signal detection theory, false positives, and the lay confusion that Bayesian P(A|B) !== P(B|A).
You're right that we could take steps to fix it, but unfortunately, those steps involve mass education that every human body has anomalies, and many of those should just be ignored.
We'd get a wave of anxiety, lawsuits, and unnecessary interventions, until humanity collectively internalized this.
It's also doctors. Medlife Crisis on YouTube, Barbell Medicine, others. BBM have an article on priorities for overall health and they link to a tool maintained by one of the professional bodies on what routine screens to have done and it's pretty conservative. Even my doctor on seeing an "abnormal" lab result said it was likely spurious given my lack of complaints and all the rest of the results. That said they still recommended a follow-up because they kind of have to given professional ethics. BBM (again) made a similar point: resistance training is known to cause liver-associated enzymes (AST, ALT, etc) to rise, that doesn't mean you can ignore a high value.
The steps to fixing it is to not take the test that takes you from a prior of 1/100000 to a posterior of 1/1000, because you're going to ignore it anyway. And you can't depend on multiple testing because those test results can be correlated.
ETA: I can be convinced that we can collectively get to a place where broader screening would be indicated. But I think it's going to require both of the tests getting better and being better about what we do with (and feel about) the results.
The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit.
Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths.
Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.
> Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.
My grandfather went to the doctor complaining of chest pains, they gave him a colonoscopy, and he died of a heart attack a week later! Clearly colonoscopy doesn't reduce mortality!
There's no reason for almost any medical intervention to have a statistically significant effect on all cause mortality. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any effect on mortality of individuals.
This Silicon Valley mentality applied to a mechanistic view of the body is a fucking disgrace. This will fail, and luckily we won’t have to endure more of Silicon Valley’s dunning krueger on steroids about medical solutions. The Silicon Valley has NO CLUE of the complexity of clinical science, yet they hold this populistic view that everything can be foxed with tech and nothing stops the hybris. We all can see where that leads
Aren't most of the current/latest advancements in health care coming from tech and software?
> every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan
Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?
Wouldn't help much.
* Some kind of scans, like CT scans, use ionizing radiation and should not be done too often. * Looking at only imaging scans it is often impossible to tell apart a cancer and a benign growth. (More invasive tests would still be required, which was what the parent posters were warning about)
I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.
It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.
One obvious alternative plan, presupposing that Full Body Scan is dirt cheap, is the following protocol:
- At 25 years old or whatever you get a FBS. Pretty much no matter what, this FBS will not be used to do more checks, procedures, and so on.
- ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.
There's still an issue with needless procedures, but the amount of 'weirdness that are not going to cause an actual issue had the patient never been aware' is significantly reduced by looking only at changes. i.e. most 'weirdness' shows up early and is fairly stable.
The difficulty is the moral issue. You cannot show that first scan to the patient. Even if every soul agrees beforehand that the rule is that nothing on that first scan, no matter how scary it looks, is further investigated... any medical issues raised by patients are used as a major information input for diagnosing issues. If I show a patient a scan that has this tumor looking thing on the left lung, then no doubt a few months later they'll be back complaining about shortness of breath and a pain on the left side of the torso. The mind is a powerful thing. At that point you can do a scan and see... the same nasty tumor looking thing we saw on that first FSB, and we're right back to the issue of these scans doing more harm than good.
Is it morally acceptable to hide that first scan from the patient?
I think the issue with this and the proposed ‘spa’ scan model is that the diffs are usually meaningless. We all have cysts, masses, and weird shapes that shift around and show up on imaging. Many of these shapes require biopsy to determine what they are. Without symptoms the false positive rate is ridiculously high.
Modern medicine sort of requires us to suspend the idea that we can know everything happening in our body at any given time. If we could develop a diagnostic technique to instantly determine if shapes in our bodies are malignant or benign something like frequent full body scans could be interesting, but they really just introduce noise right now.
> - ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.
The diff can be meaningless as well. All sorts of benign things develop with age.
The resolution is the problem. You can't do the type of cytology and histology needed to understand all disease with just scans.
"It's a controversial and complicated idea. "
It is neither controversial nor complicated to detect some cancers by scent.
Taking the "headspace" of something is also not really complicated.
There are people who can reliably smell/detect Parkinson:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...
You gloom on one aspect, the smell. OP focuses instead on full body scans themselves, and the irrelevant issues with everyone's bodies they would highlight.
*glom
The question is: If you have enough full body scans of many healthy people, and the statistical tools to model it (beyond "this range is OK"), whether this would reduce these false alarms to an acceptable level.
The real crux of it remains though: Let's say it finds something that increases your death risk by x=0.1%. Could you sleep? I'm not sure. Let's say the operation has 2x=0.2% risk. What do you do? What value of x makes this a problem for you?
You're absolutely right, and I share the frustration.
I'm thinking a possible solution to this signal-to-noise problem is to embrace the longitudinal view: instead of comparing each scan with the normal across the population compare only against past self, unless there's a risk factor that warrants it.
This way we could presumably make use of plentiful scan data and mostly look at the stuff that evolves in suspicious ways, not what looks suspicious.
This always feels like a thinly veiled excuse to ration healthcare. Would these same doctors refuse a full body MRI to a billionaire paying out of pocket?
Anything found can be monitored with focused follow up scans. It doesn't have to be immediately biopsied if it's in a location where that would pose a risk of iatrogenic harm.
At a population level, this would be both extremely time-consuming, and rather expensive.
More generally, no test is perfectly accurate, and for low base rate conditions the vast majority of positive tests will be false positives.
Like, again, as a data person I adore this idea in principle, but there would be a lot of details that we'd need to figure out to make it a reality.
That sounds like a problem with applying the wrong threshold for a positive finding, possibly due to liability concerns or wrong goals.
To work, it would have to be incredibly accurate (specifically, have an incredibly low false positive rate).
I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.
There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.
More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.
It's obviously a lie to get us to accept no tests due to limited machines. The same as when COVID started masks "didn't help" because they didn't yet secure enough supply for everyone, then when they did, suddenly the masks helped.
Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less. Our bodies are not special.
It's also ridiculous that the proposition goes like:
1. Doctor knows some tests will flag tumors or variations that look weird and that we shouldn't then go investigate all of them
2. Doctor shuts off their brain and will then investigate all of them by doing invasive procedures
Just knowing how many such variations there are and if they grow or not is useful information. But the doctors pretend like they are super smart before the test and super dumb right after.
This kind of thinking (that it’s an obvious lie, perpetrated by a cabal) is the sort of superstitious bullshit that is going to jet us all killed. Look up Bayes theorem. As yourself how good a test would have to be if the base rate is low. Wonder what the probability of harm might be if the next advised test was invasive and the patients was anxious because a lump had been detected.
You should read til the end! No cabal, just stupidity and believing other people are stupid instead of telling them the truth and expecting them to act smart based on the information.
Ask yourself, do you think billionnaires have yearly MRIs or that they wait for later because the doctor and themselves will be anxious? It's an argument that treats regular people as stupid.
First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability.
If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable.
Also, it’s quite likely that billionaires are having lots of unnecessary procedures and that harm is being caused. The mri scans are not the reason they live longer!
Ok but now the argument shifted from "More MRI = bad" to "More MRI = okay as long as doctors do a good job and have enough time". I agree with that. My point was just that it's possible to get to a point where everyone having yearly MRIs is doable because the issue isn't with more information in itself, it's with doctors not having enough time for the patient.
But now your argument also depends on no opportunity costs for doing unneeded mri, or infinite medical resources.
As I said … we really don’t known how much harm billionaires are suffering (sob) and there are much simpler explanations for their longevity.
It's not the same doctors saying they themselves are simultaneously smart and stupid. It's "smart" doctors saying that as a point of policy, it is not a good idea for biomedical companies to try to make a buck off of popularizing unnecessary diagnostics, because anxious patients will by chance or by intention find a "dumb" doctor who will agree to perform invasive procedures. (Have you ever heard a tech person say that the tech world has a lot of stupid ideas? It's the same thing.) Look up what happened with South Korea diagnosis vs. mortality rates when they instituted national thyroid screenings in the 90s.
> Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less.
With perfect humans in a perfect society, maybe. But such is ignoring the elephants in the room here, from the actual experts on the topic.
So do you think the doctors should hide the data from you so you don’t know anything looks weird, or tell you it looks weird but they don’t think it’s worth investigating it? And do you think the average patient will say “ok that’s fine, I’m not getting a second opinion and if I die my family will sue you into the grave too”?
I believe doctors should tell you the truth and not assume you will do things later that are detrimental with the information as that has a lot of bad consequences.
Case in point, doing that during COVID I think amplified the wave of antivaxxers and medical denialists. Which itself had in my opinion a way worse effect on global health than almost anything else recently because now you have to convince a number of people to trust the medical system again.
A sample size of 3 is hardly statistically significant.
From what I could found, billionaires die on average at ~83 years old. ( https://strygin.substack.com/p/how-billionaires-die )
It's not far off what a decent health care system is able to provide in most wealthy countries. It's even somewhat lower actually.
It's difficult to assess the risk factors, but in the end, I have the feeling their additional medical staff and their ability to "cut the queue" (S. Jobs-style) just barely offsets the additional common risk factors (stress, long hours, segregated life), specially if we compare to the upper-middle class.
In the end, there is no magic $100M pill giving you 10 more years. And in truth, access to food, drinking water, a non-toxic environment and really basic healthcare & medicine (vaccines, antibiotics) probably already brings you at a fairly high life expectancy.
>> It's a controversial and complicated idea
sure, and there will be downsides.
But that data will be valuable nonetheless.
All the reasons you’ve listed are excuses why my government healthcare stopped having annual checkups. But to me it’s just worse quality care
Sorry, but that's a morally corrupt idea.
Don’t make me tap the sign.
Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem
There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.
When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.
Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.
Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.
So you are certainly correct but you can also tighten up your definitions for true positives as you have more information on your false positives. There may exist additional signal as well.
To your point though I think there is a difference between collecting and evaluating additional data sources and using them as diagnostic tools.
I suppose I fundamentally disagree with the implication of your post that there is no value in gathering further data for these reasons, it would seem to suggest we’re already diagnostically optimal and could not do better with additional signal.
Positive for what, exactly? Quoting convnet, above:
> The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Also, overdependency on "spas" for health information could lead to an atrophy of other sorts of medical information gathering and diagnosis. e.g., there's no mention in the dreamy description of this spa experience of getting a blood draw or a patellar reflex test.
The root comment is talking about adding blood, breath, urin, spit... analysis. For body imaging only I agree with you. But if we add all this, I guess we'd be able to rule out many false positives
Your "guess" is not merely incorrect but logically invalid ... such added tests (which ex hypothesi are all negative) have no bearing on false positives from tomography.
Sure collecting more data makes sense. We agree there. If that gets you to the required degree of statistical confidence my argument is moot.
I heard the same argument from my doctor when I wanted a blood scan.
But what's the intention? If you do a scan and then try to find everything that is wrong about you, you're 100% right, there will be false positives and unnecessary panic/medication etc.
However if you just collect data for months and years and WHEN you get a symptom you have a lot more data then we should be able to give better diagnosis faster. If we do that for long enough as humanity and there is data sharing the accuracy of the whole thing will increase a lot.
I think it's (at least partly) about the psychological impact of finding something unusual. Even if you know that it's probably nothing and understand the Bayes theorem, there will be a "what if" that might be strong enough to do actual harm (nocebo effect).
Compare: The placebo effect works (at a reduced rate) even if you tell people they're getting a placebo!
This. All diagnoses are "given this set of symptoms and test results, which is the most likely issue".
By having a whole slew of test results already, you will have much better priors.
That's precisely where medicine is headed: personalized medicine.
You [hopefully] won't have to become a rare missed diagnosis because you didn't fit the demographic for this or that screening test.
Cost of genomic analysis is exponentially decreasing, and so much progress is happening so quickly.
Consider for example how in cardiology we advanced from ASCVD's 10-yr prognosis, to the PREVENT 30-yr prognosis. And still most providers are using the ASCVD score for their patients.
You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.
The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.
A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.
It's scary in both directions.
If you let it give out tons of false positives, then patients are trained to ignore it when it cries wolf.
If you dial it back so that it gives out fewer positives, then now it starts giving out false negatives and not helping sick people.
Heh, Signal Detection Theory strikes again! This problem is as old as detecting whether a radar blip is a WW2 bomber on its way or not.
Sadly, there's no perfect threshold when the signal and noise distributions overlap substantially, just different trade-offs.
(Love CI, btw!)
You're right. I wrote a bad response at midnight. I meant to say something more narrow and specific: genomic assessments and new biomarker tests will become affordable and add information.
For example, single nucleotide polymorphisms. This way doctors spend less time guessing which medication is likely to work best for you when there are many options available.
That doesn't sound like a useful test then. Instead use tests with fewer false positives.
If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless.
I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.
They kind of are. Spain doesn't have yearly physicals, and during a GP visit, they don't even take your blood pressure. Blood tests are extremely uncommon, unlike in British medicine, where they take your blood pressure every time and blood tests are so prevalent people usually request one from time to time despite having no symptoms. Spain's example showed the above (or the lack of) doesn't increase all-cause mortality and even excelling in longevity statistics.
https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/a01_0455.html This japanese article found "No clear-cut evidence exists to determine whether undergoing health checks leads to greater longevity and/or lower medical expenditures."
Several published papers agree. There is in fact little evidence to support regular checkups if you’re asymptomatic.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/
And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/
I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.
Math does indeed make for solid arguments. If you want to make a counterargument then you have to address their math, which you didn't.
This is why you have multiple successive panels. If there's a disease that happens for 1 in 10k people, and you have a test with 1% FPR, 99 of 100 people will be false positive.
But what you can do then, is either run a more expensive, elaborate test or one that's proven to be statistically independent on the positive testing population.
FPR can even be a good thing. Let's say you have an expensive test with a very low false positive rate. Then you can mix together 100 samples, and get a test with a much worse FPR 100 times cheaper. Then you can repeat the same individually on the positive population.
This is fully automatic and you don't even think about it. Btw, this is why mass testing, and public healthcare can be better. You can amortize the cost of things across a large number of people for no disadvantage.
You've got that completely backwards. Correctly applying Bayes' theorem, if an anomaly is observed you incorporate the prior into the calculation of the posterior probability. You don't just give up and say "the prior is miniscule so the likelihood is useless".
And then, even that's not enough. Decision theory needs to be applied to decide what action to take. That means taking into account the expected QALYs, cost and inconvenience across the distribution of possible outcomes. There's a whole spectrum of possible decisions, from immediately performing surgery, performing an invasive test like a biopsy, performing other less invasive tests, scheduling a follow-up non-invasive test at a later date, or just following a regular schedule of non-invasive tests and looking for any evolution along a longer time period.
The real problem is the binary thinking of either "we think you have X" and therefore tests must be performed or "we think you don't have X" and therefore tests shouldn't be performed. If medical organizations adopted empirically grounded decision frameworks, by applying them consistently doctors would be able to see something anomalous, assess that the risk isn't high enough to warrant immediate investigation, and be protected from a lawsuit in the unlikely case it was, in fact, something. And then we could do away with this "if we look we might find something" nonsense, which is pure fallacy.
The argument has some merits, but we should remember that, from the point of view of Bayes, you could apply the same argument to symptoms, which is only evidence. High odds of a false positive, means that you have not enough evidence, not that you have not useful information.
Testing healthy person for any illness by definition has infinite number of nines in false positive rate.
Problem is we never know who is healthy. That is why we are doing the test.
You can just run more tests to get increased statistical power.
No you can't. Statistical tests assume independent data points. Testing the same individual repeatedly would be pseudoreplication, leading to wrong conclusions.
If you mean run different tests, where you collect different kinds of data from the same individual, sure but that's not something you can "just do" in the general case.
Medicine is not a statistical field. I've seen many times doctors dismissing someone "you're young, you can't have X". Although there is some truth in what you're saying: full body CT scans are on the rise now.
We could test symptomatic people.
Many smaht people have already pointed that out.
It's news to no one that tests are imperfect.
Do you have any concrete solution to that? Anything of value?
Yes, don’t do tests on asymptomatic low-risk people until you can demonstrate that a positive result has any meaning whatsoever.
Hypertension is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause stroke, heart attack, or organ damage through long-term vessel strain, by which time damage may be irreversible; detecting it on time can prevent this with lifestyle changes and medication.
Diabetes is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause damage to blood vessels, nerves, kidneys, and eyes through chronic high blood sugar, by which time complications may be advanced; detecting it on time can prevent or delay this with treatment and lifestyle changes.
Hyperlipidemia is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause artery blockage through cholesterol buildup, by which time heart attack or stroke may occur; detecting it on time can prevent this with diet and medication.
Kidney disease is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause kidney failure through gradual loss of function, by which time dialysis may be needed; detecting it on time can slow progression.
Glaucoma is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause irreversible vision loss through optic nerve damage, by which time blindness may be permanent; detecting it on time can preserve vision.
--------
I'm SO glad you're not my family doctor!
At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office takes it wrong, even cardiologists, amazingly).
On the other end of the spectrum, what doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola. The prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.
Most diseases are in between and have to be evaluated case by case, not buckshot.
You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.
> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/
I suspect your doctor would agree with me. See if they’ll test you for Ebola, for instance. Not because you have symptoms but just cuz.
I mostly agree with you by one small wrinkle is that the evaluation of screening is normally against a criteria of cost effectiveness as well as safety. So for some conditions, if cost effectiveness was the barrier to rollout it might still be worth it if you are rich?
The decision as to whether mass screening is justified or not is complex, and varies a lot by test/condition/population etc. Luckily there are lots of smart people whose job it is to do these caclulations.
In your list, 1-4 are common enough, the tests are accurate enough, the costs of intervention are low enough and the benefits of early intervention are high enough to justify screening, which is why they do generally screen for them at least in hgiher risk groups. The other two are more mixed, which is why mass screening is less common.
All the evidence for full body scans is that they are not justified for asymptomatic people. The false positives are high, the costs of these false positives are high, and the imporved outcomes are too low to justify them. If you want one, go ahead, but realise that almost anything it finds is likely to be false either positive or not likely to ever cause a problem, and you'd have to deal with the worry and invasive tests and even surgery in aid of something that may never cause any trouble.
Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.
Why is this shocking ?
In the UK I see a medical practitioner before any tests, always.
The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.
The idea here is to make scans very common and regular, hopefully from early age of the patient. It could be like a blood pressure measurement at CVS.
There is this infamous DANCAVAS study [1] in which they ran cardiovascular screening on older population and found absolutely no benefit in doing so. Note that while the linked study claims there was a benefit to screening (reduced mortality in men aged 65-69), the apparent effect was caused by improper statistics (primary endpoint did not show benefit, only subgroup analysis, which however lacked statistical power to be reliable). And indeed, their follow up study showed that there was no benefit in the subgroup. [2]
Many a dollar is wasted every year on trying to prove population-wide screening prevents mortality or increases patients’ quality of life and every time we don’t cheat with statistics we get the same answer - population-wide screening isn’t effective.
1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208681 2: https://www.escardio.org/news/press/press-releases/No-signif...
There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.
This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.
Other tests should be solved too (fecal/urine/blood). Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.
We already have patients trying to track their own health over longer time which is great. We then just have to make AI good enough to spot warning signs (without patients asking). Or parhaps we need to make those tests easy and cheap and regular.
> Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.
In general yes, just that "more" is monstrously massive to the point of it being closer to science fiction than reality, IMO.
To reiterate, various assays fluctuate rather wildly over the course of various body cycles. The reason(-s) your doctor should remind to get a blood drawn in the morning after a period of fasting is that the sample is taken at a somewhat steady state and the result is comparable to reference values without too much of a margin.
Anyone with a requirement to manage blood glucose levels will tell you that CGMs are vastly superior to finger pricks first and foremost due to the sample rate available and comfort reasons secondarily. With a finger prick test the patient is only somewhat aware where in the curve they are, which makes the test only a rough estimate due to this temporal error margin. A lot of people do not zero in their readings with finger pricks as they are mostly interested in the deltas.
Suppose you manage to make urine sampling relatively accurate and super cheap (e.g. tens of eurodollars per analyzer or cents per test strip) so you can have poorly-supervised, long-term studies with huge cohorts. However, unless you somehow control for sample collection conditions, all this baseline variability suddenly infects your whole dataset and effectively raises noise floor. It's not unreasonable to expect that whatever was found to be a useful signal under controlled conditions to fall below noise floor under uncontrolled conditions.
That's basically THE problem with the hypothetical test-it-all machine. Again, maybe in some cases that could be extremely useful, but in a lot of cases that would be counter productive. However, what CGMs hint us at is that various kinds of Continuous X Monitors could provide insights into body reactions to things, which is, currently, effectively not a signal in general medicine. Once the test-it-all machine is reframed as an array of continuous monitors and the useful signal is reframed from long-term drifts to short-term deltas it may unlock some additional diagnostic pathways.
false positives are a real problem
Only if you let them. The false positive thing is a nonissue that only arises from assuming you would respond to information a certain way.
I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode about the negative impact of full, generalized body scans on a patient's wellbeing decades ago.
The medical industry should NOT be paternalistic towards patients. People have a right to decide for themselves and be treated as adults capable of informed consent. Thankfully that model is starting to change, although there is much inertia.
Any test that is approved for use would have a better-than-random outcome distribution. Preconditioned on that, a test result is still useful no matter how uncertain. It is never the case that more information leaves you in a worse position.
I have personal experience here:
Every year I have elected to have ultrasounds done of my major internal organs. In the past two visits, the technicians spotted multiple developing growths in my liver and now kidneys. These are very likely to be benign cysts, but one piece of blood work that could be a marker for cancer is inconclusive. The odds are still high that this is totally benign and will either clear up on its own, or at least stop growing and cause no further issue. Still:
1. I'm getting my blood work done now far more frequently (twice per year instead of every other year), with specialized/not typically ordered screening tests;
2. I am redoing the ultrasound every year to track progress; and
3. I am actually taking advice about losing weight and exercise far more seriously than I otherwise would, as these issues often resolve with weight loss.
I am actually healthier now than I was two years ago, and feel better about my physical and mental well-being. All while staying on top of what could have be a life threatening issue if left untreated and ignored.
I look forward to the day when I can go get a monthly MRI-like scan. That would be wonderful.
Well now we’re going down a different path. Telling people to go burn through mountains of cash to get tests they don’t need is not ethical.
Costs me less than $1000 so far…
Almost half of the US population doesn’t even have $1000 saved away nor do they have insurance that covers these tests. It’ll be far more expensive unless insurance deems it necessary, which none of what you’re suggesting would be by definition.
> I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad.
No its not. This is extremely paternalistic. Humans know how to understand noise and statistics. You don't get to decide that for me. I want more lives saved with more information.
It’s not paternalistic. It’s reality. Most people are not equipped to vet all the medical information that comes their way. That’s why we should talk to our doctors about results.
I don’t think my mechanic is being paternalistic when he talks through my car and what is/isn’t important. I like that helps me prioritize things. Why is this any different? In the end a person can tell a doctor “I don’t care run the test” or whatever so what’s the big deal? You can still do what you want. Get that biopsy if you need the peace of mind.
I agree but do you want your mechanic to hide information from you for any reason? For instance, that information can have false positives.
Like, your mechanic hides the fact that your engine may be broken but he's just 70% sure of it. Since he's not 99% sure, he hides it from you. Do you think its a good thing to do?
That makes no sense at all, unless you're saying that people should respond to all such information by ignoring it.
You could repeat the test, perhaps on a more frequent interval to keep an eye on it. You could follow up with a more specific test, or do confirming blood work. In the meantime you can adjust your diet as a precaution, or get motivated to get in shape just in case.
There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."
Or only consider it a positive once the confidence is high enough that false positives are not a problem anymore.
Getting a test good enough to still make it useful (detect enough of the true positives) would of course be a challenge, but the more data is available, the more feasible that might be.
There is a lot of space between ignoring and doing invasive dangerous operation after some blot was spotted on some imaging diagnosis.
In which case, why bother getting the information in the first place?
P.S. The responses ignore what I actually responded to, which was a claim that "The false positive thing is a nonissue" -- where the "thing" is 99% false positives. The only way to respond to information such that "the false positive thing" becomes "a nonissue" is to never respond to it at all. The responses to my comment all address some strawman.
yeah? give adequate accurate information to people and let them decide what to do with the information.
if someone told you, you had a .01% chance of getting a disease for example, aren't you better off with that information? even if it is noisy?
??? how is more information worse than less? if you know the extent of false positives -- use it! its better than having no information.
the question should be: does cost of obtaining extra information pay off in lives saved. i would say yeah obviously.
> With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses
> > labeled with diagnoses
I know you’re not suggesting this is easy, but I can absolutely promise that the land of medical reporting, diagnosis and imagery is about a 1000x more complicated and unhinged than you might expect.
What does "solved" mean here? Identifying "the disease" correctly every time? On average identifying the right course of action? For each individual identifying the right course of action? Probabilistically or with certainty?
> pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing.
Somebody should make a startup based around the idea of diagnosing diseases through eg. a drop of blood. Probably need a bunch of big name investors though
In the rest of the world diagnostics aren’t expensive at all and medical data is centralized already (blood, MRI are almost routine for hospital visits, all data stored in govt systems).
During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.
> walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab
Maybe take it out to dinner first?
Theranos2
Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school.
Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator, if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infinite amounts of variations in human bodies, which means even the best models focus only on segmenting known organs, and leave anything unknown alone.
This is more true than people realize. My wife and I got full body MRI scans.
Both showed "possible" medical issues. My though was "Great, I have a baseline, in two years I'll get another one and compare".
My wife on the other hand got a bit obsessed about her results and had what was probably an unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.
I suppose you could argue that another way...better safe than sorry...but the stress that is caused by known uncertainty vs unknown uncertainty can be too much.
> ...unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.
The point here is many issues can't be resolved safely with a biopsy or minor procedures, so one ends up under serious risk of a major surgery for something that would never cause any damage.
Plenty of people die this way. If not, one might even thank his doctor for saving his life afterwards.
Not a doctor, but the overdiagnosis concern is at the intersection of three phenomena:
1. Imaging is expensive, just in dollars and time, even without analysis
2. Imaging is not without impact -- CT scans, especially full body scans, expose the body to ionizing radiation
3. Imaging is time-consuming
The net result of these means that full body scans are difficult to interpret. If a doctor given a patient complaint suspects a condition that is sufficiently non-specific that a full-body scan is required, then the scan will be interpreted through the lens of the known progress of the differential diagnosis. And typically these scans must be done without a healthy baseline, so minor findings in this context might have significant diagnostic power when combined with history or other findings.
But on a healthy patient, minor findings are very likely to be noise, because we don't have a great deal of experience with scans of healthy people, for the reasons above.
This technology, if it pans out, gives a way of inverting 1, 2, and 3. If every healthy doctor visit includes one of these scans, then the medical field gets experience interpreting them, and more importantly, when new symptoms occur, previous scans can be compared to determine whether a particular finding in the current scan is new or has changed.
If something like this became commonplace (and accurate enough), then it could be fantastic for research: enabling us to map out what variations are common and which aren't in a way that hasn't previously been feasible.
In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy.
It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.
It's not unreasonable to think that the level of acceptable risk for "the language model parsed my text wrong" is in average much higher than "the medical model misdiagnosed my condition". You can probably come up with scenarios where a language model behaving unexpectedly would have drastic consequences if you imagine them hooked up to automatic systems where they have immediate control over actions that can't easily be reversed, but like, that's why it's a bad idea to use them like that, and they're the exception rather than the rule. It seems plausible that scenarios like that for medical models are a lot closer to the norm than the exception, in which case the tolerance we have for them "filling in the gaps" incorrectly would need to be much smaller.
this doesn't need to be a diagnostic model, just a data source for existing doctors
I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!
It seems like the radiology equivalent to a blood testing machine that could be deployed to walgreens and detect 100 diseases with a finger prick.
But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.
This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.
Ultrasonic imaging is definitely not novel. And it requires you tolerate being fully submerged. And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet.
As a consumer health device, we haven't even gotten the population at large to wear biometrics and the CGM fad is over. Full body scans that cannot be used by a physician are not generally useful. If they aren't targeting FDA approval right off the bat, they are wasting their time. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry
> And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry
So, an MRI quality image for less than $2000 and the downside is that you have to use a towel afterwards, and that's not solving a problem?
> Except now you are soaking wet.
Oh no, how terrible! I have to use a towel and dry out like when taking a bath or shower...
Now, I have no idea whether this promotional video has any substance behind it, or whether 3D-reconstructed ultrasonic scans are usable by physicians right now. But, come on, your complaint is about getting wet?
Cats need not apply.
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.
1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.
That's likely the datarate of the ADC chips. You would downsample them directly on the FPGA board and maybe perform an FFT or similar transform. 16 TB/s across a few dozen FPGA boards is nothing crazy. After some early stages in the signal processing you might transfer 1 or 2 TB/s over ethernet to the servers. Entirely feasible considering we have 800 gigabit/s ethernet.
You’re completely right, this is why currently ultrasound reconstruction happens on FPGAs. They would need a lot of them given the number of transducers. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6057541/
There's probably compute done on ram to reduce the file size before it hits disk. Definitely going to be redundant information in the scan.
How old are you? I've been conned all my life by tech companies selling us "deliverance from work", "permanent Mars bases", "asteroid mining", "AR/VR everywhere, for everyone, all the time", "crypto will replace money", "3d TVs are the new hot shit", "self driving cars for everyone in 2 years tops"
I don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?
>I don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?
As they say there is a new sucker born every minute.
(You already alluded to it when you asked the person's age)
Yeah - this is the truth. I roll my eyes at nearly every "technology breakthrough" headline I see, and specially those involving medical technology. It almost never turns out to be true. Just last week, there were two separate cures for cancer that hit the HN front page. All hype and bullshit, of course. This piece from Midjourney starts off with patients wading into a "golden pool of light". If that doesn't set off your bullshit detector, I don't know what will. This is not how serious people talk about serious medical advances.
I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
Totally agree.
This community can be much better than that.
They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd.
Is this some AI hallucination post?
I've been sitting here trying to do sleepy morning train commute maths. 1billion scans per month, 50,000 scanners worldwide (!). 1 minute scan time. Lowers platform at 5cm/cm. FTA. Globally, apparently in 2023 there were 250,000 spas worldwide. [0]
Their numbers would suggest these 1 billion people, getting scanned by 50k scanners, have each scanner doing 20k scans a month. 31 days, 24 hours, we have 744 hours in which to do these. That's 20k scans/744 hours, giving you 26.8 scans/hour. One scan'll be 2.2min. 2 minutes 14 seconds.
If this machine is 200cm big, lowers at 5cm a sec, that gives you 40seconds to lower. One minute to scan. 40 seconds to get you back up, presumably. Even if we're generous and double that, you're at 2 minutes just to lower, scan, and yeet you back up.
Giving you 14 seconds between scans. To clean, maintain, etc. Seems like this machine will output investor AI hype, bacteria, and false positives.
I linked the spa statistics because there's the question of how they'll even get the room for these machines but whatever.
0-https://gitnux.org/spa-industry-statistics/
I don't think this changes anything important, but my understanding is that the lowering is the scan -- you go through the ring, which captures data about the slice currently inside it. That gets you down to ~80s, which rounds to a minute (they say "about 5 cm/s").
Now, there's a lot of other reasons to be skeptical (e.g. there's no information on what all of this imaging could actually resolve), but please don't shoot the message.
Lots of folks in here calling out the "billion scans a month" and skipping over the "capable of" part.
They're not claiming they'll perform a billion scans. They're trying to build enough machines that if absolutely all of them were run at 100.00% capacity it would be theoretically possible to do a billion scans a month.
My thoughts exactly. Some openclaw got loose.
If I had the means, and if it was as convenient/pleasant as this, I would absolutely get an MRI every month.
The spa is brilliant. Think of corporate rec days that also cut insurance costs. Good lord, its like you're new to hypercapitalism :)
> They've lost the plot, especially with the spa.
Yeah, that's not just 'cart before the horse', it's more like cart before the wheel. They make a bunch of extraordinary claims yet offer zero evidence, info or even a plausible hypothesis on how those claims might be possible at the scale, timeframe (2027) and unit economics implied. Thank goodness they really thought through the accent lighting for a calming user experience though. Otherwise, I might have been concerned they're not serious. </s>
But they have a picture showing a higher resolution Ultrasound CT result than a 1978 MRI! Surely that's important and useful information by which we can judge their product.
https://cdn.midjourney.com/static/medical/media/first_mri_vs...
From: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery
I did see that. And it does look better. Okay, I'm sold! Sign me up for my spa visit including avocado facial peel, genital waxing and computed axial tomography ultrasound.
More seriously, I assumed that CT Ultrasound image is from Butterfly's actual FDA-approved handheld medical device, not the Midjourney 360 submerged ring - as there's no evidence that is working. Since the Midjourney site has no helpful information, I just asked a friendly AI to do a comparison of what's actually proven to work in the Butterfly chip which Midjourney licensed and this 360 degree, full body, submerged concept - and essentially what's not been proven to work are those three differences: 360 degree ring of 40 butterfly chips, full body at once (requiring solving distance and speed challenges as well as a massive signal processing problem to extract and denoise signal), and doing it submerged.
I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.
Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.
Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.
Is the idea to use AI magic to detect cancer and other bad things?
I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months.
Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.
If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.
If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.
This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.
Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem
Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.
In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.
As we gain more data, might we be able to find patterns in that data that we now cannot see? I'm not only thinking of these regular scans but combining it with other data sources, like maybe regular, more complete blood panels, Apple Watch data, whatever we can get our hands on. Maybe we can find data points that together have a lower false-positive rate, like lump plus increased nightly body temperature plus weight loss.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. That test is wildly more accurate for you than it would be for me, and even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the positive tests would be wrong.
Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.
Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.
The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.
If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?
It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.
Timing is also important. I can predict cancer with 100% success, because everyone will get cancer, unless they die of something else first.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
https://voices.uchicago.edu/pearsonlab/
Fair point. Definitely not a replacement; it’s meant to bridge the data gap.
Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.
Now society needs to vibe invest!
I can only imagine the swarm of AI agents constantly feeding into this project at different levels of product development and even management. (To be fair, if it works out, it might become a template for future "AI-led organizations")
There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
Ultrasound is totally harmless, but doctors recommend ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable"). Average baby is exposed to 50 - 90 minutes of ultrasound over three visits, though we had to go more frequently for scans for all three of my kids. This would be 36 minutes if you went in every week. If it was possible to get medical quality anatomy scans and avoid transvaginal scans (either because of the tech or simply just going reguarly enough to catch all the imaging you need) then it would win the entire US market for sure: roughly $3-7B for the ultrasounds (3.5M US births at $1-2k per for ultrasounds). also it's a spa -- prenatal wellness spend in the US estimate at $5-7B.
They don’t recommend them overly frequently because it’s unnecessary, but it’s not harmful to mom or the baby in any way.
This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.
Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.
Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.
First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute
radiologist here - example images don't look great
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
> I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this
Never underestimate the audacity of a software engineer with a new toy
> It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Well, if you replace LeBron with Jordan, and Bowling with Baseball ..
The founder of midjourney is not a software engineer.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
I'm pretty sure, like most things, it's better to wait and see what's built rather than take issue with their short marketing video.
I mean, Michael Jordan did play for the White Sox for a hot second
It’s because no one has heard from mid journey in a few years so they’re pivoting
Instead of the value of evaluating a single scan, what about determinations made from evaluating regular deltas between images?
As a layperson, I'm mostly familiar with the concept of "get scanned, and a professional evaluates it"... are there scenarios where the approach of "imaging every few weeks, to make decisions based on trends" is currently done?
(From reading other comment threads here, I suspect the general answer is: other body-scanning startups have proposed the same thing, and it hasn't made sense)
As an aside, I could probably benefit from allergy shots, but the idea of having a regularly scheduled errand to do during the workweek is pretty unappealing, so I never seriously consider it.
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?
Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.
But isn’t this much cheaper and easier so even if they are not quite a good, the accessibility and ease and thus much more data is better?
More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
> It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body.
This is exactly my thinking. There are decades of longitudinal studies behind the recommendations physicians make based on given levels of e.g. cholesterol in a standard blood test. And critically, those depend on standard protocols around administering and testing samples.
This would be brand new and would not have any of that infrastructure. Which all tech starts at, good. But I would expect Midjourney to need to dig in for a few decades to get and analyze clinical results and outcomes.
For body scans, I think about how few people would know if they have e.g. three kidneys (or other distortion), and how that impacts/doesn't impact their health.
Most people do not undergo autopsy after death, so it's possible there are correlates between good/bad health outcomes that frequent scanning would eventually reveal. But it would take significant time for this to be apparent.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.
Would it be suitable for basic body composition (as they claim in TFA)? DEXA is a big business and companies push a subscription model where they encourage you to get monthly scans. The results are really fun to look at and the dose is admittedly very low, but you're still getting rastered by an x-ray. It would also explain the spa angle and hence why they're doing that before going for regulation.
> We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3770049/
It's obvious why they're doing this: there's a lot of money in healthcare.
What there isn't is good evidence that these full body scans actually improve outcomes.
Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?
FWIW, I tried the prototype. It's very real. I scanned my hand and arm. It showed realtime images of slices of my hand as I dipped my hand in the water. Really amazing IMO. I think this will be a game changer when it comes out. It's just so easy to scan yourself.
Did you get any interpretation of the imaging? It sounds cool (I'd take an ultrasound selfie) but it has to be medically useful for something before enough doctors grade enough images to kickstart the data collection for diagnosing more.
I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.
The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.
It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.
The spa approach also achieves what’s probably the key ingredient to making this useful medically — consistent data over time. We know the “what’s this fuzzy bit!?!” hysteria with elective scans can be counterproductive, but if you truly had monthly scans going back 2 years, the fuzzy bit could in fact mean something.
Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?
Only if there's AI involved in some form.
https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20
This covers a lot more details than the announcement.
EDIT: Actually looks like their announcement has another page linked for more details containing this video.
In the early years of X-rays, doctors found all sorts of patients with major organ displacement, and performed surgery to, for example, hold the liver or kidneys “up”.
It took a while to realise that textbooks since Leonardos time had drawn and based anatomy on (dead) patients lying on a slab. But X-rays were taken with (alive) patients standing up. So of course there was a lot of “your kidney has slipped!”
I fully support and applaud this kind of medical innovation (even if … why midjourney?) but we need to be careful of the medical term VOMIT (victim of modern imaging technology). At some point we need a human doctor to say “calm down, live your life, eat right, exercise right, and accept that somethings don’t need to be panicked over yet - come back in six months”
A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.
So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."
But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...
If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.
But what if most "masses" are cysts or other harmless structures that form during the 80 years we're walking around? I think that after about their 3rd useless biopsy people start to feel the problem with this.
Of course we can keep tuning and tuning the models, but in the limit it may well make more sense to wait for symptoms. At least that is the current experience.
Now maybe this machine will make sense in screening age 55+, 20 year+, 2 pack+ smokers for Lung lesions (where a much large portion of detected lesions are true positives). We do this currently with CT and this may be better or cheaper. But it doesn't look like it is, and it looks like far (very far) lower res than MRI (often the follow-up of a CT-scan).
Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.
Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?
You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
That was probably not GP's point, but they can be. Sound-based weapons are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
The sci-fi writes itself. Someone hacks the spa’s schedule to find out when you’re getting your scan done, then hacks the machine to push the output to 11 when you’re in, and liquifies your insides.
The first Midjourney Medical murder.
"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
Focused ultrasound is already used as an actual surgery method and they have to carefully balance the parameters so it does not produce heating and damage [unrelated] tissue. Obviously a scanner would not aim for the same power/effects but it is possible to cause harm, yes
> You want as much data as you can get about your health
The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.
1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.
2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.
I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.
To me it reeks of desperation.
Not sure why people keep posting links to X videos when they are available from at the official announcement post: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
World's first trillionaire doesn't need more money or influence in destroying people lives, let's do a small step at a time and not use X.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains.
Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)
I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month?
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
There's a world of difference between the health checkups we get in Japan, and something like a full-body MRI/CT.
You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.
Are you joking? 人間ドック is absolutely more than a "health checkup". Maybe do some reading: https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
That is not the same as the annual mandatory health check.
Maybe your employer pays for you to get a more comprehensive checkup by default and you're unaware of this?
But the ones vast majority of population here gets do not include MRI or CT or Endoscopy.
And, _even then_; specific checkups when you're looking for _specific things_ are still very different things than a full-body MRIs.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
I don't think there's much difference? The technicians that perform the tests are not doctors. You usually see a doc for 5 mins at the end, to discuss any anomalies. Even then, they're just going to refer you to see your GP or a specialist. At the end of the day, the ningendoku is just information that your doctors can access. I'd much prefer a high-resolution full body scan.
Either way, the patient should make the choice about whether they want that info, not an insurance company or a know-it-all armed with a dubious study concluding that asymptomatic conditions are better left undiscovered.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
That's definitely an important point to consider, in fact something I think everyone in these conversations should be cognizant of, and also why it makes me believe the actual conversation should move to whether the device improves false positives/negatives rates or not (or at least has a chance to), which then might warrant wider access/use.
A better question is if people are going high-res, why not go high-res with tests whose accuracy is known, and for which there are useful, data-driven treatments?
Instead of casting a net of unknown quality every month, comparing against a null dataset (there does not exist a large dataset of these scans with outcomes for given markers).
Why not advocate cheap, easy blood/urine tests with higher frequency? Those tests do have large reference datasets with outcomes. And they have prescriptive value: there is likely more benefit to catching hypertension or diabetes earlier in more people.
True, though those things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Something doesn't add up. The entire Japanese healthcare system is built around the idea that preventative testing for asymptomatic conditions is effective. You can read all about it, if you want.
Personally, I think you've swallowed some kind of health insurance industry black pill, whether you know it or not.
>You can read all about it, if you want.
I don't need to, I've lived in Japan and done the Ippan Kenshin which is the once a year health checkup. It consists of getting your weight, height blood pressure measured, an eye test, urine tests for diabetes and a blood test for cholesterol. That's very reasonable.
The one thing some doctors still tend to do is a chest-xray, which is not reasonable. They do it because tuberculosis was widespread in post-war Japan and they just kept doing it, but it has no positive impact on mortality rates.
I don't read the parent comment to take issue with the use case per se but the billion scans per month figure.
Surely, whatever this is giving you, getting a scan once a month must be plenty. They need a billion people to get a scan every month.
Because false positives have a tremendous emotional (and, depending on your healthcare system, also monetary) cost to patients.
Theoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.
From what I've read, full body scans are awful for this--your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
> your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
Um, that's still a tumor.
Yeah but it's not cancer.
I'm not so worried about the data being useful, I'm worried about the machine actually working.
I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
> What's so bad about having some false positives?
Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.
It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
I would guess build a health prediction model. Instead of next text token or next frame in a video, how about next 12 months or years of body health?
Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
Who reads these scans and who assume liabilities for missed reads?
AI[no one]. The customer.
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
The top 100,000 families taking this scan every day would still put them 2 magnitudes below the target.
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
What? This comment chain is specifically about the target of a billion full-body scans a month using 50,000 units.
That's about 1 scan per unit, every 2 minutes, 24/7.
50,000 hypochondriacs could pull that off easily
It's really not OK to victimize the rich like this either.
I can’t tell if this is serious or a top tier joke.
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Isn't therapy or enlightenment ultimately cheaper?
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.
Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs
I have thought that extremely accessible, portable, non-radiation imaging would be revolutionary. Imagine every doctor - or even every person - had a handheld thing they could wave over your affected area to get a high res 3d image of the issue. Of course we have mri, xray, and ultrasound, but those are big and expensive. Obviously there are engineering reasons that is the case, but It seems like a concerted effort to make imaging more portable and accessible, coupled with ai to help analyze could bring about all sorts of follow-on health improvements. Your regular practitioner could check you for heart blockages, clots that lead to stroke, cancers etc as a matter of course. I’m not sure stepping into a golden vat of water is what I have in mind but medical imaging does seem like a possible area for drastic innovation.
Actually doctors tend to frown on people getting full body MRI scans with no symptoms because they tend to cause many false positives.These false positives often trigger a stressful cascade of unnecessary follow-up imaging, bloodwork, and invasive biopsies.
I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough.
Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth.
But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.
water filtration seems like the easy part
No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.
Super cool. Reminds me of Mary Lou Jepsen's (who did One Laptop Per Child) company Openwater, which is using some kinda infrared holography, also as an alternative to MRIs.
Supposedly they can be made lightweight and wearable.
https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen#Openwater
April fools 2027 is gonna be nuts
We live in an era where the daily news stories are so crazy topping them is going to take some creativity
I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?
is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image
There's deterministic algos for it and have existed for ages.
Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.
> Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.
Where's your sense of fun and adventure? /s
One thing invents a bunch of fake bullshit using artist's work and the other is supposed to give you an image of something real and meaningful that wasn't just hallucinated or patched together. All from the guy who brought us Leap Motion, a gimmicky product that failed to live up to the hype. This isn't exactly encouraging. If it actually works we won't need a press release on their website, we'll hear about it in medical journals and it'll be doctors singing its praises. You'll find it being used in hospitols and not pop-up spas.
Only after that happens will I have to even consider how comfortable I am with the idea of handing over what they suggest will be massive amounts of highly personal medical data to this company and how much I trust them not to exploit that information for their own purposes and profit.
Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.
I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293
After reading this first, it looked almost like a joke, like how Google used to do Google- TISP Toilet Internet Service Provider https://archive.google/tisp/install.html
Even now without Xrays it is very hard to really even see if there are blocks in your artery usuing ultrasound (Echocardiography alone). Ultrasound is used indirectly by measuring blood flow difference between stress and rest - not a spa session anyway. Looks like a prank really
3D Ultrasound helps a lot in this regard. Getting flow velocity out and tissue motion is very possible if you can support the data rates (in my group we've had some luck getting coronary artery 3D flow out using 3D ultrasound probes). The issue is that 2D ultrasound and flow is an unsolvable problem, so you really do need all 3 dimensions here.
This is a full body ultrasound?
Medical I don't care about futuristic sounding stuff. Just show me evidence based and clinically useful testing.
Use AI and new scans to help sure but prove it works otherwise this could be another dead end.
I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.
This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!
I had to check whether this was some kind of an april fool joke.
It looks like a legit attempt. Wow. This is insanely innovative.
Interesting choice to draw "inspiration" from the chambers of Niander Wallace, the main antagonist in Blade Runner 2049.
https://architectureofsilence.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/archi...
slide 28
https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...
And slide 25, although it is questionable if this is really the result of such a device like Midjourney is presenting.
If it is then wow!
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.
This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.
If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.
Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.
(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)
It will be terrible for brain imaging. The ultrasound waves can’t go through the skull and thus can’t image the brain. Additionally you would have to drown the patient since you need a medium other than air between the ultrasound emitting probe and the body which is water in their device.
CT is more than sufficient for imaging the brain in a case of trauma and MRI is not automatically better than CT in every case.
(I am a neuroradiologist)
I won't have an opinion until Brian Johnson tells me how much younger this makes him.
Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.
If this all works, and becomes widely available, I wonder if people would get a lot of health anxiety. Now they can see stuff that is normal, but strange or unexpected.
I’m no doctor by any means, but what if, as an example, an organ fluctuates in size, or composition, naturally. A medical professional would know these things, but a random person off the street might get stressed out and start to panic, or perhaps overcompensate with their diet or something.
I think more data is generally good, but data without context or insight can be problematic.
Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.
Genuine question.
Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.
Massive Theranos vibes.
You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.
The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.
So if it works: Awesome.
The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
It's probably hard to make it hygienic enough to be standard hospital equipment to be honest
I think it is because they want something that feels nice so people will go there more often?
So they get more data of the same person over time.
I have zero medical knowledge, but assuming that they go through a good regulatory approval process, why is everyone so negative?
These are smart people trying something new. They are bootstrapped.
How is that not cool? Isn't this exactly the type of thing that should be exciting?
Awesome work. The second video is great. I don’t know enough about medical science to consider viability and shortcomings, but I’m impressed by the dream. Keep cooking.
And even if the device fails, I’m sure the spa will be nice.
This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.
> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
> What This Leads To
> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.
There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.
There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.
What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.
I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.
I can only applaud. Regardless of whether this device is possible, or economically viable, this is a brave move and a bold vision. Taking bigger risks is what what makes the advances possible.
I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.
Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.
Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.
I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
[0] https://sytse.com/cancer/
>"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed."
Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.
They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...
There are huge backlogs of folks for imaging... Radiologists aren't exactly sitting around daydreaming all day waiting for a patient.
I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.
People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.
This would be really cool if it comes to fruition and works in the way they want it to.
Given the source, I will treat it as nonsense science fiction until it’s built, functional and scientifically tested.
I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?
> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.
With "you" being a VC backed startup aiming for the next $1T IPO. What could possibly go wrong?
Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article:
> As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.
Yeah sure. That's not going to be a sustainable model. Once the tech is available and money is to be made, lots of for-profit alternatives will appear with marketing and lobby budgets that will take over the market.
Remember Open AI was a non-profit at some point. Look at how that turned out.
I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.
Exactly. With "you" in the original post I didn't mean the exact actor right now but whoever will be in charge eventually. When good actors leave the stage, you are only left with the bad ones.
So it's what, computational ultrasound? Why are they making it sound so much like they're going to steal my kidneys?
Wonderful stuff, good job Midjourney.
An AI can be trained on body scans to detect diseases, tumours etc. Ideally this can be trained on real scans with real diseases but you could also train on synthetic data (synthetic bodies and/or synthetic diseases).
You can also focus ultrasonic waves to destroy (vaporise or cook) diseased tissue.
> Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.
Why is that almost every LLM generated article sounds like a LinkedIn motivational post?
(this is not a rhetorical question, I would really like to know why, from all the writing styles, this is the most prevalent one)
So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?
I don't think it says it is a target, just that they will have that capacity.
No, you stand there for 60 seconds.
If every hospital had one, even if they sat idle 90% of the day, thats enough to hit that target.
A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion scans ago was last month?
It does not work this way.
Do you need the math typed out?
In order for 50k scanners to perform 1 billion scans in a month, they need to be run nearly 24/7. It will require (in a 30 day month) an average of 129.6 seconds per scan, including both the 60 second scan time and moving people on and off the scanner surface. You get just over a minute to move someone off, clean the system, and get the next person onto the platform. If you neglect cleaning the system, and everyone is ready to go, then this is just barely possible if it's 100% reliable.
If they sat idle for 90% of the time, they wouldn't have enough time for the 60 second scan, let alone moving people on and off the platform. The math for their claimed target does not work.
My comment was "if every hospital had one" rather than "if 50k hospitals had one" but either way, the math gets to the order of magnitude stated. Nitpicking how much buffer they gave themselves for cleaning doesn't disprove the math - the target is years away, and solving a trivial gap is just a matter of speeding up the scan or putting multiple people in.
Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?
Great point. Scanning healthy people is one thing, people who truly need help (like myself) is another!
> As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.
Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.
Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...
Imaging is not preventive care. Exercise is. Good food without chemicals is. Good sleep is.unfortunately these important parts cannot easily be monetized to provide stock options to the insiders/
This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.
> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.
Why don’t they approach this as a regular medical product?
With this spa angle I’m worried about hidden motives; perhaps data collection is a major goal. Or maybe this tech is not reliable enough.
Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice
Yup. But it'd be good to get certainty by going to Walmart or CVS or Wholefoods and getting a scan for $30.
They should ask their LLM for fun things to do in prison! Or ask Elizabeth Holmes.
This is interesting & ambitious!
Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?
This is one of the creepiest "big AI" product launches I've read. I know it's becoming a meme, but that spa looks like something from a Black Mirror episode.
If they were just creating a new less-invasive and differently informative alternative to fMRI / PET / EEG / CT for researchers and doctors to use in hospitals, where experienced human doctors were given agency in finding out how best to use the tool and interpret the results (understanding all the caveats that go for full body scans, false positive rates and so on[0]), then that would be amazing, a tiny step forward for the human race. But packaged like this, eww.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580255
https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china
Remind me of this, radar based.
Always trump with the savior card when bad PR¹ starts creeping in.
¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332
Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.
After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.
When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.
It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
Yes, it's the healthcare industry's fault, they're brainwashing me into not getting more procedures. Sounds very plausible.
Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.
Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would be justified. Chemo is a life saver when it's saving lives -- if the alternative is no symptoms, it just ruins your life for a profoundly uncertain upside.
Well, you've reduced a rational position to absurdity here. The concern isn't that someone is going to require chemotherapy. The concern is that an asymptomatic condition will go undisclosed until it is symptomatic, at which point preventative treatments are futile.
Even if we accepted your example, there is a fundamental inconsistency, since doctors in America regularly prescribe very serious drug interventions for patients who essentially self-diagnose for being neurotic/adhd/etc.--actually a much worse problem than the one you're so eager to curtail.
If you seriously think this is a realistic scenario, you should call your doctor and tell him you've decided you have cancer and would like to order chemotherapy. See what he says.
Nobody is deciding for themselves to do chemo because they think something looks funny on a scan. All the scan gives them is a reason to talk to their doctor, who will do all the usual due diligence before deciding on treatment, if any.
And on the flip side, I hear stories all the time of people who DO have symptoms but they get dismissed by their doctor as stress or food allergies or whatever until it's too late. Maybe if patients were armed with a scan that shows a mass at the site of their abdominal pain, there would be fewer of these horror stories.
"I called my doctor and asked them to prescribe me poison for no reason, and they said no. Checkmate, atheists!"
That sounded like a zinger in your head, eh? It's okay bud, spending every waking minute posting snark on HN must be tiring.
>The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
you forgot one more, which is subjecting people to potentially risky procedures for things that were not a health risk in the first place.
Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
It would radically alter medicine.
couldn't it be different when scanning becomes very cheap and quick and it's the delta over n scans that gives signal?
Because a lot of the hatred for AI is just hysteria.
"when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging
Counterpoint: When you're not looking for things, you don't find them.
Which is why the current US administration is destroying any kind of science that might find, say, climate change, or emerging pandemics.
> Midjourney Spa
Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms
It reminded me more of Blade Runner, especially with the gold lighting.
I feel confident I can pass the Voight-Kampff test
There's a certain type of people the Midjourney folks are involved with in SF. They're high on their own supply. See also hacker houses etc
This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.
one nice thing may be way to enhance penetrative ultrasound eg smaller immersive ultrasound tomography in smaller dip tank hey stick your leg in this thinner immersive tunnel , e.g., extremity up-close immersion or trunk wrappers vs just wand-based?
Hell yeah, my AI image generation company is now running an alternative medicine AI MRI-alternative imagine spa. Hell yeah.
I just cried watching that intro video!
It's like, wow, us humans have a new tool to help us be our best!
Beautiful!
Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality
I thought this was a satire at first
Sounds like programmers woke up from a fever dream and decided they can come up with an idea and flesh out the details later.
Well that's certainly an interesting pivot, when Midjourney where set to announce hardware, who predicted this?
This is surely trolling? "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" has quite the acronym..
This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.
Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.
I have seen AI projects to convert a tomography into actual 3D models.
Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.
we don't even need AI for that: https://3dqlab.stanford.edu/what-is-volume-rendering/
We had this for a long time
Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.
Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?
If you could obtain volumetric/3D ultrasound data that was not operator dependent, that would be great.
US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.
However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.
edit: clarification
More just interested in medical imaging in general but: unobstructed soft tissue imaging is possible with this, e.g. abdomen. You can get reasonably good differentiation between types of tissues using ultrasound in this context although there is the potential for ambiguous findings where further scans like MRI will be required to get less ambiguous information about it.
Chest cavity, brain tissue scanning etc. will likely remain unrealistic as ultrasound waves won't penetrate bone and the ribs and skull will interfere.
How much is a scan going to cost? The video motions petabyte per scan? These types are scans (medical images) are extremely dense and large in size, storing short or long term images sounds like its going to be extremely expensive when combined with AI analysis, etc. Not to Mention the cost of operating a Spa is not cheap, especially if your buying real estate, and the cost of the machine itself.
Is this a dystopian Spa, where full scans cost 50k, and basic ones are 1-5k?
I think the scanner outputs petabytes of raw data that then get processed down into images, so you would only need to store an image per slice ideally, kinda like MRI DICOM files.
There is no way I am letting an AI image generator take scans of my naked body
Part of me is super excited about this.
The other part wonders if this is the next clinkle.
MJ has shipped stuff before though so I’m optimistic.
Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?
MRI uses EM radiation in the radiowave frequency band. This is using sound.
And doesn't bone pretty much block all ultrasound waves? There is a time and place for ultrasound, just like there is for MRI or Xray.
So im curious to know the limitations of this device
I'm just guessing here but similar to a CAT scan, having actuators/probes at all angles could mean you can get an image around such obstacles. skull is probably an exception and it's the reason why we don't see any head scans in any one of the videos.
Also I imagine it pretty difficult to get good data from that because of all the muscles that do stuff if put in water and you would hold your breath.
There is no way people will put up with that.
I'm sure I read that 30% will be immortal there, but suddenly the blog post changed... :)
So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?
Sounds good to me.
Thank you very much, Midjourney.
If some of my doctors were software engineers I probably would be dead by now.
Or mid-dead.
If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market
Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.
AI is about to find out the difference between talking and doing. Exciting!
I personally have been dealing with an elbow injury for over 3 years. I have been to all the known places in the bay area and shown it. One surgery, countless doctors (some who took MRIs), and many physiotherapy sessions later the problem still exists.
I believe if a willing doctor takes images all over the elbow, and looks carefully, they will find the cause. But they aren’t willing.
Disappointed with the healthcare here, I for one, would love a solution that takes comprehensive data of my body and tell me what’s going on.
I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!
Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.
I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293
At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.
Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.
my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.
my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?
Anyone know the song that's playing in the demo?
Need an update from Elon about what he meant when he said "Midjourney is not mid" and what he thinks now https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784
Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.
The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.
Where is the belly button?!
Why not have 5,6 rings at different levels and do it live in 3D?
I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise.
But hey if not, actually cool.
Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong
This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:
a) it is possible to construct such a scanner
b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything
c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful
But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.
Elysium is playing out right before our eyes
Are we at peak AI yet?
AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up
For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.
Welcome back theranos
They will do everything but not release the API
20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.
At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”
3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.
I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.
If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.
Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?
Most isn't 3d, it's hand positioned single slices.
they call it Promethean Spas... Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver.
The math does not math
ER Nurse here:
This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.
The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.
So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.
These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.
Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.
I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.
What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...
Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.
I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve
It’s valuable to have input of healthcare professionals here. I don’t disagree with the majority of what you’re saying.
However, the value add here is it can do your whole body a lot faster than doing a full body MRI (which would take hours at least?)
Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.
Interesting but many issues which have been listed here are valid. This is my take on the largest of them.
Preventive testing is not always positive. False negatives creates a false sense of security and false positives drives unnecessary medical procedures. For example, what if this instrument sees "something" and a doctor then follows up with a biopsy, x-ray or explorative surgery. These will all have negative side effects. There has even been a debate of if mammography is a net positive. I think it might be but I'm just saying that even such a thing is debatable. The question is not only if the these early tests find anything, its also a question of whether detecting it early changes the prognosis. Maybe its untreatable anyway? Or maybe it would still be treatable if detected later? And then comes the cost of course, is it economical to do these scans on a population level relative to the alternative cost.
Building medical systems is not for the faint of heart. I was part of a startup building a Micro CT system with the long term goal of using it to detect tumors in biopsies live during surgery (1 um resolution for cm-sized samples) without waiting a week for the normal analysis. We also started with non-medical instrument (general research) and we never got to the medical instrument before we ran out of money (we engineers were too bad at sales). But we did study up on the (European) standards quite a bit. They are not crazy in any way. Its simply that you follow good engineering practice BUT it is hard to move from building a non-medical system to medical system after the fact. The standard is a process standard so it basically says "You should have followed this process when you designed your product". And you need be real careful setting your Intended Use and showing that you have Verified and Validated that your system can be used for the intended use. So most likely they need to build one product now (Body Composition Analysis), use that for research and then set up their Quality Management System before they rebuild everything from requirements to risk analysis to test plans to hardware to software. 10 years is probably on the low side for this and quite the cost.
TL;DR: "Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body."
Dolphins aside, is this basically a new angle on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography?
Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?
This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.
Is this company public? Can I short them?
You don't need to build a perfect med spa, you only need to control the patents of the key pieces of a med spa.
This is nothing more thab a prophylactic patent grab to stifle competition and progress in this space for the next decade and/or hoover up patient data behind a paywall where they will gladly lease the weights and bias cure to you own disease back to you in the form of a subscription.
They made the opening credits from Westward.
Congrats!
THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?
1) what?
Who needs a head anyway?
But why? It doesn’t say why?
This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it
This is the most insane thing to happen to medical imaging
To understand Midjourney Medical (MM), think about current major options: - CT/X-ray: harmful if done too much && can't do for pregnant women - MRI: slow, have to stay still, no metal - Ultrasound: really low fidelity
Midjourney Medical is fast, high fidelity, and perfectly safe!
The holy trifecta.
Insane vision. Insane work. Hats off to the team
> It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation.
...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?
Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?
i want a full body scan from the friendly discord app.
Strong theranos vibes
It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.
The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.
At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.
Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?
HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.
How are people possibly taking this seriously?
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
2 inches / sec * 60 sec = 120 inches = 10 ft ? It also doesn't seem like it scans your head from what I've seen.
It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.
MRI & CT go from captured data -> displayed image via real provable hard math.
This seems to imply that there is an LLM layer involved. Which means hallucinations. No thanks.
we're hitting the hype peak shortly
They'll get so much money, all the 60 year old billionaires in SF are so desperate not to die.
Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.
This is like the plot of the movie Elysium
> "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"
FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.
So this is the purpose of building the backroom pools
Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes.
I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators.
It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself.
There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.
I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though??
Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI.
The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.
This is very concerning:
> Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated.
I have questions in general.
Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous.
Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought.
Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.
So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something.
The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?
This is the most "getting high on your own supply" I have ever seen.
What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?
Not a joke, they really think that doing billions of full body scans will reduce healthcare costs and make people less anxious.
Any scientist not on the payroll will tell you the opposite. You will get millions of false positives, causing anxiety and unnecessary interventions. This has been studied extensively and we have the stats.
I too wish I could just jump into a machine every month and it declares me free of cancer. Instead it will find new irregularities every time with no easy way to confirm it's benign. This idea does not work.
Surely they have a paper or something on this?
Yesssssss, AI overlords put me in your dolphin technology powered human deep fryer.
We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.
The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?
Generative models have been used in healthcare for a while for things like drug design and data generation. Not to mention all the algorithms (and probably ML) used in generating results for MRI and CT scans. I don't think this is that crazy provided they can prove it's effective.
You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.
I was trying to say there's precedent for using ML in this field. I don't think they even said this product is an image generation model. It's probably some ML version of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography
I also found this researcher on their staff who studies tomography https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=idvD2yYAAAAJ
This looks remarkably dystopian.
This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.
I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?
They founded LeapMotion previously which was pretty big and totally unrelated to AI. They've been doing all sorts of shenanigans it seems
Also fmr cofounder of leap motion, which developed a mouse that didn't you to touch it!
> can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
What do you mean here?
The idea came from LLMs? They built this with LLMs?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
So the idea is Midjourney uses LLMs as a sounding board and came up with this idea?
Yeah. This is a "Long Blockchain"-tier pivot and it will go nowhere.
Current Vibes:
https://twitter.com/DavidSHolz/status/1883770659974889769
https://twitter.com/DavidSHolz/status/2040939992068096018
You can just build things
“Just building” radiation emitters like CT scanners is a bad idea.
This is ultrasound. You didn’t read the article. It’s perfectly safe.
Theranos 2.0?
The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.
Well, the math is the other way. If you assume a 30 day month, you have 2,592,000 seconds each month to perform scans in. With 1,000,000,000 target scans and 50,000 machines, that's 20,000 scans per month per machine.
2,592,000 seconds / 20,000 scans = 129.6 seconds/scan
If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.
Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable.
Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).
Yep, and with full body submersion, they'll need to change out that water regularly. And people think data centers waste water, Midjourney says, "Hold my beer."
you can build the datacenter right next to the tank and use the now-warm cooling water to pump into the tanks!
This shit is immune to parody, it’s the most California thing to ever exist. “We’ll fix your health problems with an AI spa”. A spa. Give me a break.
At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.
What the actual fuck
This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.
Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.
What the hell is wrong with companies these days?
> you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body
No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.
Medical Doctors: scans on healthy patients are not a good idea
Tech bros: hold my beer…
spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho
I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.
Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?
Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.
Presumably you can just hang from above.
I doubt it. Would that not interfere with the scan? I’ve really no idea on the merits of this.
Why would that interfere with the scan?
Great, a hallucinated output that only the super wealthy can afford, only to waste doctors' time with the need to run every test again at huge expense. Can we not leave medicine to the professionals? Creating a ghibli rip-off is not the same as diagnosing cancer.
Well healthcare needs its own DLSS 5!
I would just add that my wife is a doctor and in the age of AI it's truly unbearable. In addition to super long hours and stress they now have to deal with patients coming and thinking they know better than people who spent more than a decade in education because of what some chatbot told them.
Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.
I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?
I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.
it would suck if Chinese tech advanced medical care faster or made it cheaper.
Being realistic is good
It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.
Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".
Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.
Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.
Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.