- 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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'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 particularly helpful; you could easily have done the 5 minutes of work.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

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.

you were surprised to find out that stress and carbs raise blood sugar?

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.

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?

What's the limiting factor that prevents medical imaging from getting cheaper and more available?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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".

Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?

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?

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.

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.

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.

(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.

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 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.

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.

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.

"More data" is quite literally irrelevant.

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.

"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.

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.

This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible

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?

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.

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.

[1]: https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8

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.

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

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.

Something unusual in a single one-off scan vs something unusual and changing over the course of multiple scans give two different views.

People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!

Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

”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.

You really think creative people are not interested in new forms of visual expression?

This as simply being ignorant of art history.

Doing it under their main brand is very weird and I don’t quite see how it translates to creatives at all.

God forbid someone should try to do things to benefit society with their fortune.

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 :)

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)!

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?

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.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

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.

this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today

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.

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.

Mostly they hate patients who have opinions

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.

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

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...

https://x.com/SebastianCaliri/status/2067452733356122303

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Is it? Linear No Threshold has largely been rejected at this point. https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed....

A good primer: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2477686/

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...)

I don't think "someone used their tool to produce a silly result and used it" qualifies as Midjourney having questionable history at all.

And the safety of the data as well. Am I supposed to entrust full body scans to a startup?

(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

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

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 video is clearly from Midjourney /s

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Go right ahead!

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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").

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.

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.

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

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)

They have unmatched breadth of knowledge by default, and can maintain attention across entire medical histories.

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.

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.

But we would have great data over time, both individually (weird tends to only matter if they are changing) and as a population.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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-...

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.

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".

What makes MRI machines expensive is that they are big helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have to be continuously kept at a few Kelvin.

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.

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).

I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

- 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?

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.

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.

To work, it would have to be incredibly accurate (specifically, have an incredibly low false positive rate).

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...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

sure, and there will be downsides.

But that data will be valuable nonetheless.

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.

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.

Compare: The placebo effect works (at a reduced rate) even if you tell people they're getting a placebo!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Sadly, there's no perfect threshold when the signal and noise distributions overlap substantially, just different trade-offs.

(Love CI, btw!)

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Problem is we never know who is healthy. That is why we are doing the test.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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...

This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.

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.

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.

> > 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.

There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

the question should be: does cost of obtaining extra information pay off in lives saved. i would say yeah obviously.

During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.

Maybe take it out to dinner first?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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 don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?

[0] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/midjourney-revenue-...

Let doers do.

This community can be much better than that.

Is this some AI hallucination post?

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/

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>

https://cdn.midjourney.com/static/medical/media/first_mri_vs...

From: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.

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.

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.

What there isn't is good evidence that these full body scans actually improve outcomes.

It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.

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 ..

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.

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

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.

> 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/

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.

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.

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”

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.

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...

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).

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

EDIT: Actually looks like their announcement has another page linked for more details containing this video.

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 first Midjourney Medical murder.

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.

We live in an era where the daily news stories are so crazy topping them is going to take some creativity

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)

https://architectureofsilence.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/archi...

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.

Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.

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.

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?

There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.

You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Um, that's still a tumor.

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.

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.)

Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.

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.

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)

That's about 1 scan per unit, every 2 minutes, 24/7.

To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.

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...

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.

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 talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293

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

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.

Is this a dystopian Spa, where full scans cost 50k, and basic ones are 1-5k?

https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...

It looks like a legit attempt. Wow. This is insanely innovative.

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.)

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)

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.

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.

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

And even if the device fails, I’m sure the spa will be nice.

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.

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.

The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?

So they get more data of the same person over time.

> 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.

Which is why the current US administration is destroying any kind of science that might find, say, climate change, or emerging pandemics.

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)

With "you" being a VC backed startup aiming for the next $1T IPO. What could possibly go wrong?

> 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.

Remember Open AI was a non-profit at some point. Look at how that turned out.

Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.

It does not work this way.

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.

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.

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.

¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332

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?

Remind me of this, radar based.

Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.

Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms

- 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.

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.

If some of my doctors were software engineers I probably would be dead by now.

Or mid-dead.

The other part wonders if this is the next clinkle.

MJ has shipped stuff before though so I’m optimistic.

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

Chest cavity, brain tissue scanning etc. will likely remain unrealistic as ultrasound waves won't penetrate bone and the ribs and skull will interfere.

So im curious to know the limitations of this device

There is no way people will put up with that.

Sounds good to me.

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.

I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293

AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up

Dolphins aside, is this basically a new angle on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography?

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

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?)

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.

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.

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?

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.

But hey if not, actually cool.

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

Congrats!

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.

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.

Given the source, I will treat it as nonsense science fiction until it’s built, functional and scientifically tested.

...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?

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?

FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.

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/

What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?

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.

I also found this researcher on their staff who studies tomography https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=idvD2yYAAAAJ

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?…

I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?

This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.

Current Vibes:

https://twitter.com/DavidSHolz/status/1883770659974889769

https://twitter.com/DavidSHolz/status/2040939992068096018

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.

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).

Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.

> 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.

Tech bros: hold my beer…

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.

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.