Midjourney Medical

https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

by ricochet11 • 1 month ago

1377 864 1 month ago

midjourney.com

https://www.midjourney.com/medical

Video: https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797

ricochet11• 1 month ago

https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20

busymom0• 1 month ago

This covers a lot more details than the announcement.

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

verandaguy2• 1 month ago

I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month?

For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.

What possible use could there be for doing this?

I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.

jofzar3• 1 month ago

Theoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.

compass_copium• 1 month ago

From what I've read, full body scans are awful for this--your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.

schoen• 1 month ago

Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).

I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.

Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.

(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)

sandworm1012• 1 month ago

Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.

We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)

tptacek4• 1 month ago

It's really not OK to victimize the rich like this either.

xboxnolifes2• 1 month ago

The top 100,000 families taking this scan every day would still put them 2 magnitudes below the target.

therealdrag0• 1 month ago

I would guess build a health prediction model. Instead of next text token or next frame in a video, how about next 12 months or years of body health?

Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.

jonahx• 1 month ago

What possible use could there be for doing this?

Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.

The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...

nihonde9• 1 month ago

"What possible use could there be for doing this?"

I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.

What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?

lonely_wanderer3• 1 month ago

A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.

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

Barrin923• 1 month ago

because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.

My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.

The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.

klausa3• 1 month ago

Because false positives have a tremendous emotional (and, depending on your healthcare system, also monetary) cost to patients.

ngruhn• 1 month ago

I don't read the parent comment to take issue with the use case per se but the billion scans per month figure.

Surely, whatever this is giving you, getting a scan once a month must be plenty. They need a billion people to get a scan every month.

d_burfoot• 1 month ago

What possible use could there be for doing this?

The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.

sheepolog• 1 month ago

What possible use could there be for doing this?

Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.

dumbmrblah• 1 month ago

Who reads these scans and who assume liabilities for missed reads?

kelseyfrog2• 1 month ago

AI[no one]. The customer.

tills13• 1 month ago

The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?

potatoman222• 1 month ago

Generative models have been used in healthcare for a while for things like drug design and data generation. Not to mention all the algorithms (and probably ML) used in generating results for MRI and CT scans. I don't think this is that crazy provided they can prove it's effective.

noobermin3• 1 month ago

You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.

jofzar3• 1 month ago

This is the most "getting high on your own supply" I have ever seen.

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

jofzar3• 1 month ago

Surely they have a paper or something on this?

nom• 1 month ago

Not a joke, they really think that doing billions of full body scans will reduce healthcare costs and make people less anxious.

Any scientist not on the payroll will tell you the opposite. You will get millions of false positives, causing anxiety and unnecessary interventions. This has been studied extensively and we have the stats.

I too wish I could just jump into a machine every month and it declares me free of cancer. Instead it will find new irregularities every time with no easy way to confirm it's benign. This idea does not work.

Reubend• 1 month ago

I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?

cglan2• 1 month ago

is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image

rich_sasha2• 1 month ago

There's deterministic algos for it and have existed for ages.

Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.

autoexec3• 1 month ago

One thing invents a bunch of fake bullshit using artist's work and the other is supposed to give you an image of something real and meaningful that wasn't just hallucinated or patched together. All from the guy who brought us Leap Motion, a gimmicky product that failed to live up to the hype. This isn't exactly encouraging. If it actually works we won't need a press release on their website, we'll hear about it in medical journals and it'll be doctors singing its praises. You'll find it being used in hospitols and not pop-up spas.

Only after that happens will I have to even consider how comfortable I am with the idea of handing over what they suggest will be massive amounts of highly personal medical data to this company and how much I trust them not to exploit that information for their own purposes and profit.

aenvoker4• 1 month ago

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

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

donohoe2• 1 month ago

Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.

fastball2• 1 month ago

Presumably you can just hang from above.

donohoe2• 1 month ago

I doubt it. Would that not interfere with the scan? I’ve really no idea on the merits of this.

cglan2• 1 month ago

First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute

tanin• 1 month ago

I had to check whether this was some kind of an april fool joke.

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

bhouston2• 1 month ago

Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.

I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?

I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.

skavi• 1 month ago

it would suck if Chinese tech advanced medical care faster or made it cheaper.

ttoinou2• 1 month ago

Being realistic is good

NikolaNovak• 1 month ago

Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>

staticshock• 1 month ago

For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

danpalmer2• 1 month ago

The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.

Jtsummers4• 1 month ago

Well, the math is the other way. If you assume a 30 day month, you have 2,592,000 seconds each month to perform scans in. With 1,000,000,000 target scans and 50,000 machines, that's 20,000 scans per month per machine.

2,592,000 seconds / 20,000 scans = 129.6 seconds/scan

If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.

danpalmer2• 1 month ago

Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable.

Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).

omgwtfbyobbq• 1 month ago

So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?

Sounds good to me.

JCTheDenthog• 1 month ago

Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.

owenpalmer3• 1 month ago

I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?

noobermin3• 1 month ago

Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.

ccheney• 1 month ago

Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?

noobermin3• 1 month ago

You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.

Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.

atq2119• 1 month ago

That was probably not GP's point, but they can be. Sound-based weapons are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.

I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.

cootsnuck• 1 month ago

"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895

dwroberts• 1 month ago

Focused ultrasound is already used as an actual surgery method and they have to carefully balance the parameters so it does not produce heating and damage [unrelated] tissue. Obviously a scanner would not aim for the same power/effects but it is possible to cause harm, yes

taneq• 1 month ago

I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.

benatkin• 1 month ago

Need an update from Elon about what he meant when he said "Midjourney is not mid" and what he thinks now https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784

thorum• 1 month ago

I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.

randycupertino• 1 month ago

David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.

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

meric_• 1 month ago

They founded LeapMotion previously which was pretty big and totally unrelated to AI. They've been doing all sorts of shenanigans it seems

sberens2• 1 month ago

Also fmr cofounder of leap motion, which developed a mouse that didn't you to touch it!

rellfy• 1 month ago

You can just build things

WalterGR• 1 month ago

“Just building” radiation emitters like CT scanners is a bad idea.

nonethewiser3• 1 month ago

can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis

What do you mean here?

The idea came from LLMs? They built this with LLMs?

devmor2• 1 month ago

They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.

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

da_grift_shift• 1 month ago

Yeah. This is a "Long Blockchain"-tier pivot and it will go nowhere.

Current Vibes:

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

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

jrmg• 1 month ago

can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis

This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.

I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.

Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…

tfirst• 1 month ago

It's obvious why they're doing this: there's a lot of money in healthcare.

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

nxobject3• 1 month ago

Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?

genxy• 1 month ago

Where is the belly button?!

themantalope5• 1 month ago

radiologist here - example images don't look great

bhouston2• 1 month ago

But isn’t this much cheaper and easier so even if they are not quite a good, the accessibility and ease and thus much more data is better?

themantalope5• 1 month ago

Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.

rflrob• 1 month ago

More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.

It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet

jawns• 1 month ago

I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.

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

themantalope5• 1 month ago

Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.

oliyoung• 1 month ago

I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this

Never underestimate the audacity of a software engineer with a new toy

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

Well, if you replace LeBron with Jordan, and Bowling with Baseball ..

bandrami2• 1 month ago

I mean, Michael Jordan did play for the White Sox for a hot second

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

It’s because no one has heard from mid journey in a few years so they’re pivoting

mrwaffle• 1 month ago

I'm pretty sure, like most things, it's better to wait and see what's built rather than take issue with their short marketing video.

ranger_danger• 1 month ago

Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).

The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.

But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.

swyx2• 1 month ago

can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?

davidivadavid4• 1 month ago

That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?

Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.

gertlex• 1 month ago

Instead of the value of evaluating a single scan, what about determinations made from evaluating regular deltas between images?

As a layperson, I'm mostly familiar with the concept of "get scanned, and a professional evaluates it"... are there scenarios where the approach of "imaging every few weeks, to make decisions based on trends" is currently done?

(From reading other comment threads here, I suspect the general answer is: other body-scanning startups have proposed the same thing, and it hasn't made sense)

As an aside, I could probably benefit from allergy shots, but the idea of having a regularly scheduled errand to do during the workweek is pretty unappealing, so I never seriously consider it.

causal• 1 month ago

So if it works: Awesome.

The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?

captainbland3• 1 month ago

It's probably hard to make it hygienic enough to be standard hospital equipment to be honest

i5heu3• 1 month ago

I think it is because they want something that feels nice so people will go there more often?

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

jdw643• 1 month ago

Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.

tptacek4• 1 month ago

It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.

abtinf• 1 month ago

Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.

But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.

Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.

And then there is the data.

No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.

It would radically alter medicine.

nihonde9• 1 month ago

How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:

- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.

Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.

throwawayben• 1 month ago

couldn't it be different when scanning becomes very cheap and quick and it's the delta over n scans that gives signal?

nonethewiser3• 1 month ago

Because a lot of the hatred for AI is just hysteria.

ajyoon• 1 month ago

People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.

jdw643• 1 month ago

When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.

jdw643• 1 month ago

After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.

nearlyepic• 1 month ago

This shit is immune to parody, it’s the most California thing to ever exist. “We’ll fix your health problems with an AI spa”. A spa. Give me a break.

block_dagger• 1 month ago

I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.

Cyclone_2• 1 month ago

To me it reeks of desperation.

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

But why? It doesn’t say why?

adonovan• 1 month ago

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

themantalope5• 1 month ago

If you could obtain volumetric/3D ultrasound data that was not operator dependent, that would be great.

US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.

However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.

edit: clarification

captainbland3• 1 month ago

More just interested in medical imaging in general but: unobstructed soft tissue imaging is possible with this, e.g. abdomen. You can get reasonably good differentiation between types of tissues using ultrasound in this context although there is the potential for ambiguous findings where further scans like MRI will be required to get less ambiguous information about it.

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

rvz• 1 month ago

At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.

devmor2• 1 month ago

This would be really cool if it comes to fruition and works in the way they want it to.

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

EduardLev• 1 month ago

How are people possibly taking this seriously?

That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?

We can already ask this question...

And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?

Again, we can already ask this question

We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".

You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!

And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.

More AI slop

When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall

davidivadavid4• 1 month ago

2 inches / sec * 60 sec = 120 inches = 10 ft ? It also doesn't seem like it scans your head from what I've seen.

rich_sasha2• 1 month ago

Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.

dogmatism• 1 month ago

Is this company public? Can I short them?

sberens2• 1 month ago

I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!

moralestapia3• 1 month ago

Totally agree.

This community can be much better than that.

jordanb2• 1 month ago

It seems like the radiology equivalent to a blood testing machine that could be deployed to walgreens and detect 100 diseases with a finger prick.

codekansas• 1 month ago

But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors

noduerme2• 1 month ago

True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.

So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.

wyrdcurt• 1 month ago

In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.

152334H• 1 month ago

what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.

Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.

gpt52• 1 month ago

I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.

natsucks• 1 month ago

Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.

gpt52• 1 month ago

There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.

This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.

Aeolun• 1 month ago

I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"

Kristencline2• 1 month ago

Ultrasonic imaging is definitely not novel. And it requires you tolerate being fully submerged. And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet.

As a consumer health device, we haven't even gotten the population at large to wear biometrics and the CGM fad is over. Full body scans that cannot be used by a physician are not generally useful. If they aren't targeting FDA approval right off the bat, they are wasting their time. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry

einpoklum• 1 month ago

Except now you are soaking wet.

Oh no, how terrible! I have to use a towel and dry out like when taking a bath or shower...

Now, I have no idea whether this promotional video has any substance behind it, or whether 3D-reconstructed ultrasonic scans are usable by physicians right now. But, come on, your complaint is about getting wet?

colesantiago• 1 month ago

Cats need not apply.

hombre_fatal2• 1 month ago

And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry

So, an MRI quality image for less than $2000 and the downside is that you have to use a towel afterwards, and that's not solving a problem?

toasty2283• 1 month ago

How old are you? I've been conned all my life by tech companies selling us "deliverance from work", "permanent Mars bases", "asteroid mining", "AR/VR everywhere, for everyone, all the time", "crypto will replace money", "3d TVs are the new hot shit", "self driving cars for everyone in 2 years tops"

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

IAmGraydon2• 1 month ago

Yeah - this is the truth. I roll my eyes at nearly every "technology breakthrough" headline I see, and specially those involving medical technology. It almost never turns out to be true. Just last week, there were two separate cures for cancer that hit the HN front page. All hype and bullshit, of course. This piece from Midjourney starts off with patients wading into a "golden pool of light". If that doesn't set off your bullshit detector, I don't know what will. This is not how serious people talk about serious medical advances.

dennis_jeeves22• 1 month ago

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

As they say there is a new sucker born every minute.

(You already alluded to it when you asked the person's age)

AgentMasterRace• 1 month ago

The math does not math

ericpauley• 1 month ago

Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?

bobmcnamara• 1 month ago

Most isn't 3d, it's hand positioned single slices.

lokar• 1 month ago

Strong theranos vibes

robertclaus• 1 month ago

Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?

themantalope5• 1 month ago

MRI uses EM radiation in the radiowave frequency band. This is using sound.

concrete_head• 1 month ago

And doesn't bone pretty much block all ultrasound waves? There is a time and place for ultrasound, just like there is for MRI or Xray.

So im curious to know the limitations of this device

maz1b• 1 month ago

I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.

Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.

Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.

Nikhil374752• 1 month ago

Fair point. Definitely not a replacement; it’s meant to bridge the data gap.

999900000999• 1 month ago

Is the idea to use AI magic to detect cancer and other bad things?

I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months.

Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.

arcticbull10• 1 month ago

Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.

nxobject3• 1 month ago

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/

milchek• 1 month ago

Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.

ElenaDaibunny• 1 month ago

spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho

amirhirsch3• 1 month ago

There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.

yalok• 1 month ago

is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...

twostorytower• 1 month ago

They don’t recommend them overly frequently because it’s unnecessary, but it’s not harmful to mom or the baby in any way.

amirhirsch3• 1 month ago

Ultrasound is totally harmless, but doctors recommend ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable"). Average baby is exposed to 50 - 90 minutes of ultrasound over three visits, though we had to go more frequently for scans for all three of my kids. This would be 36 minutes if you went in every week. If it was possible to get medical quality anatomy scans and avoid transvaginal scans (either because of the tech or simply just going reguarly enough to catch all the imaging you need) then it would win the entire US market for sure: roughly $3-7B for the ultrasounds (3.5M US births at $1-2k per for ultrasounds). also it's a spa -- prenatal wellness spend in the US estimate at $5-7B.

andrewinardeer• 1 month ago

Genuine question.

Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.

storus• 1 month ago

Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.

Nikhil374752• 1 month ago

Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.

unholiness4• 1 month ago

So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).

On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.

EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.

[0]https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

carlosdp• 1 month ago

that's not a video render of a hypothetical device, that's a real video of the real working device, fwiw

datadrivenangel• 1 month ago

It's just a render? Where's the video?

mrandish10• 1 month ago

the real working device

Could you expand on the term "working"? Do you mean like "working to slowly lower a person into water while videos of animated Figma UIs play back on a monitor?" Or do you mean some crazy kind of "working", like "the ring of devices we see are scanning the organs of the woman we see and the images appearing on the monitor are those just-captured organ scans?"

justaguyonline• 1 month ago

AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.

What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.

The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)

A_D_E_P_T• 1 month ago

femtometer resolution

The diameter of a carbon atom is 154 picometers. Nobody's going down into the femtos. And you're not going to get atomic resolution, either, because humans move around too much and things like scanning electron microscopes need very stationary samples. Even microscopic vibrations can blur the final image.

Which isn't to say that you couldn't get very good resolution...

kibibu2• 1 month ago

I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.

mNovak3• 1 month ago

We already ultrasound babies in the womb, so one would hope this has been studied.

zythyx• 1 month ago

From my understanding of the post, the waves that are created are smaller than light waves, and there's no evidence that light waves, sound waves or sub-sonic waves have any aneurysm-causing effects.

(I researched more and found in the video a value) The waves are 50 nanometres, and this is basically the equivalent of having a full body ultrasound. We've been doing baby ultrasounds for decades with no ill effects, so I can't imagine this being different

autoexec3• 1 month ago

It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place (https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry...).

The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)

cornstalks• 1 month ago

Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own

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

adastra225• 1 month ago

We have no evidence in favor of the linear no threshold model. That is not the same as saying that we have evidence against it.

dooglius• 1 month ago

Your link does not support, and in fact refutes, your claim

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

Weekly CTs are going to give you cancer

camillomiller2• 1 month ago

This reeks of peak bubble, it’s ok say that.

z7• 1 month ago

"I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in <1 minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine."

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

Aromasin3• 1 month ago

I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit.

Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of the Theranos hysteria.

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

I can't see how ultrasonic tomography can actually get anywhere near the resolution or penetrative depth that MRI can have.

Also The other thing I am unsure of is what the health effect of dumping you into an industrial scale ultrasonic cleaner. For example you can have doppler to measure blood flow in real time, but you can't do that for early pregnancy because of some health reason or other.

bschwindHN• 1 month ago

Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality

a-dub• 1 month ago

my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.

my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?

Jabrov• 1 month ago

They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd.

Is this some AI hallucination post?

bubblegumcrisis• 1 month ago

My thoughts exactly. Some openclaw got loose.

1attice• 1 month ago

The spa is brilliant. Think of corporate rec days that also cut insurance costs. Good lord, its like you're new to hypercapitalism :)

mrandish10• 1 month ago

They've lost the plot, especially with the spa.

Yeah, that's not just 'cart before the horse', it's more like cart before the wheel. They make a bunch of extraordinary claims yet offer zero evidence, info or even a plausible hypothesis on how those claims might be possible at the scale, timeframe (2027) and unit economics implied. Thank goodness they really thought through the accent lighting for a calming user experience though. Otherwise, I might have been concerned they're not serious. </s>

Jtsummers4• 1 month ago

But they have a picture showing a higher resolution Ultrasound CT result than a 1978 MRI! Surely that's important and useful information by which we can judge their product.

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

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

pleurotus• 1 month ago

I've been sitting here trying to do sleepy morning train commute maths. 1billion scans per month, 50,000 scanners worldwide (!). 1 minute scan time. Lowers platform at 5cm/cm. FTA. Globally, apparently in 2023 there were 250,000 spas worldwide. [0]

Their numbers would suggest these 1 billion people, getting scanned by 50k scanners, have each scanner doing 20k scans a month. 31 days, 24 hours, we have 744 hours in which to do these. That's 20k scans/744 hours, giving you 26.8 scans/hour. One scan'll be 2.2min. 2 minutes 14 seconds.

If this machine is 200cm big, lowers at 5cm a sec, that gives you 40seconds to lower. One minute to scan. 40 seconds to get you back up, presumably. Even if we're generous and double that, you're at 2 minutes just to lower, scan, and yeet you back up.

Giving you 14 seconds between scans. To clean, maintain, etc. Seems like this machine will output investor AI hype, bacteria, and false positives.

I linked the spa statistics because there's the question of how they'll even get the room for these machines but whatever.

0-https://gitnux.org/spa-industry-statistics/

Kotlopou2• 1 month ago

I don't think this changes anything important, but my understanding is that the lowering is the scan -- you go through the ring, which captures data about the slice currently inside it. That gets you down to ~80s, which rounds to a minute (they say "about 5 cm/s").

Now, there's a lot of other reasons to be skeptical (e.g. there's no information on what all of this imaging could actually resolve), but please don't shoot the message.

mindcandy• 1 month ago

Lots of folks in here calling out the "billion scans a month" and skipping over the "capable of" part.

They're not claiming they'll perform a billion scans. They're trying to build enough machines that if absolutely all of them were run at 100.00% capacity it would be theoretically possible to do a billion scans a month.

jhatemyjob• 1 month ago

If I had the means, and if it was as convenient/pleasant as this, I would absolutely get an MRI every month.

brianbest101• 1 month ago

I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.

ludde• 1 month ago

Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?

adamredwoods• 1 month ago

Great point. Scanning healthy people is one thing, people who truly need help (like myself) is another!

brcmthrowaway• 1 month ago

There's a certain type of people the Midjourney folks are involved with in SF. They're high on their own supply. See also hacker houses etc

Aurornis3• 1 month ago

enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.

There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.

What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.

The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.

So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.

Veedrac3• 1 month ago

This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.

For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.

swyx2• 1 month ago

exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.

bonsai_spool7• 1 month ago

it's _git gud_

There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.

but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.

So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.

if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it

The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms

jjmarr• 1 month ago

That's not how the legal system works, though.

If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.

Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.

raincole2• 1 month ago

No one is saying that we should stop looking. Especially not the commenter you replied to. They're saying the tech Midjourney presented isn't _gud_ enough to justify frequent scanning.

Marha012• 1 month ago

This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.

Exactly this. I mean, even if the scan is really indeterminate, at a minimum you can simply wait, then scan again. If it's truly something serious, it will become determinate at some point. Doing this is still better than nothing and carries no risks of unnecessary procedures.

cryber• 1 month ago

Consider the null space of diagnostic markers, say, the precise shape of a tissue boundary used in early cancer diagnoses that comes out blurry in an imaging system every time. More scans with the same null space will not resolve the null space.

mcphage• 1 month ago

The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.

If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.

Marha012• 1 month ago

This. The solution to all these "but what about spurious results" arguments is pretty obvious: Wait for some time, scan again, compare the results. We currently can't do this only because the required frequent scans are not cheap enough to do it en masse, so the scanning demands for masses of spurious results would overwhelm the system. Once cheap scanning (and actually good AI interpretation) becomes ubiquitous, this ceases to be an issue.

toasty2283• 1 month ago

I love how people wait for some kind of technological God or magic silver bullet to """cure""" them, but when it comes to eating clean, exercising, not sitting 8 hours in front of a fucking screen every single day, getting good sleep, and all the other low hanging fruits you can act on right now, it's radio silence even though it would solves the majority of health issues

avree• 1 month ago

Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.

The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.

bandrami2• 1 month ago

If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market

hidelooktropic• 1 month ago

Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...

tyre• 1 month ago

This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.

Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
What This Leads To
Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.

There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.

There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.

What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.

I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.

decimalenough• 1 month ago

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation.

...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?

Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?

ddxv• 1 month ago

It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.

runako3• 1 month ago

This is interesting & ambitious!

Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?

Yondle• 1 month ago

Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?

dwd• 1 month ago

That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.

handwoven2• 1 month ago

Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.

handwoven2• 1 month ago

I can only imagine the swarm of AI agents constantly feeding into this project at different levels of product development and even management. (To be fair, if it works out, it might become a template for future "AI-led organizations")

zippyman55• 1 month ago

Now society needs to vibe invest!

chhxdjsj• 1 month ago

Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs

rasse• 1 month ago

Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.

epsteingpt• 1 month ago

They made the opening credits from Westward.

Congrats!

hmokiguess• 1 month ago

This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.

rdpfeffer• 1 month ago

Part of me is super excited about this.

The other part wonders if this is the next clinkle.

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

mchusma• 1 month ago

Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.

jablongo• 1 month ago

This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!

hoofedear• 1 month ago

Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice

wkoszek5• 1 month ago

Yup. But it'd be good to get certainty by going to Walmart or CVS or Wholefoods and getting a scan for $30.

koinedad• 1 month ago

This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.

BrokenCogs• 1 month ago

Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?

esafak• 1 month ago

This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!

1970-01-012• 1 month ago

So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?

geor9e3• 1 month ago

No, you stand there for 60 seconds.

If every hospital had one, even if they sat idle 90% of the day, thats enough to hit that target.

1970-01-012• 1 month ago

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion scans ago was last month?

It does not work this way.

someothherguyy3• 1 month ago

I don't think it says it is a target, just that they will have that capacity.

kmoser• 1 month ago

"Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"

FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 1 month ago

I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors).

With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).

This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.

I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").

kilbuz• 1 month ago

false positives are a real problem

adastra225• 1 month ago

Only if you let them. The false positive thing is a nonissue that only arises from assuming you would respond to information a certain way.

simianwords4• 1 month ago

??? how is more information worse than less? if you know the extent of false positives -- use it! its better than having no information.

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

jrflowers• 1 month ago

pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing.

Somebody should make a startup based around the idea of diagnosing diseases through eg. a drop of blood. Probably need a bunch of big name investors though

aquafox• 1 month ago

The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.

wkoszek5• 1 month ago

The idea here is to make scans very common and regular, hopefully from early age of the patient. It could be like a blood pressure measurement at CVS.

CJefferson2• 1 month ago

Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.

kranke155• 1 month ago

Why is this shocking ?

arcticbull10• 1 month ago

Don’t make me tap the sign.

Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.

When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.

Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.

Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.

hereme8882• 1 month ago

That's precisely where medicine is headed: personalized medicine.

You [hopefully] won't have to become a rare missed diagnosis because you didn't fit the demographic for this or that screening test.

Cost of genomic analysis is exponentially decreasing, and so much progress is happening so quickly.

Consider for example how in cardiology we advanced from ASCVD's 10-yr prognosis, to the PREVENT 30-yr prognosis. And still most providers are using the ASCVD score for their patients.

gfodor• 1 month ago

You can just run more tests to get increased statistical power.

moralestapia3• 1 month ago

Many smaht people have already pointed that out.

It's news to no one that tests are imperfect.

Do you have any concrete solution to that? Anything of value?

appplication• 1 month ago

So you are certainly correct but you can also tighten up your definitions for true positives as you have more information on your false positives. There may exist additional signal as well.

To your point though I think there is a difference between collecting and evaluating additional data sources and using them as diagnostic tools.

I suppose I fundamentally disagree with the implication of your post that there is no value in gathering further data for these reasons, it would seem to suggest we’re already diagnostically optimal and could not do better with additional signal.

krzat• 1 month ago

If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless.

I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.

ricardobayes2• 1 month ago

Medicine is not a statistical field. I've seen many times doctors dismissing someone "you're young, you can't have X". Although there is some truth in what you're saying: full body CT scans are on the rise now.

zurfer• 1 month ago

I heard the same argument from my doctor when I wanted a blood scan.

But what's the intention? If you do a scan and then try to find everything that is wrong about you, you're 100% right, there will be false positives and unnecessary panic/medication etc.

However if you just collect data for months and years and WHEN you get a symptom you have a lot more data then we should be able to give better diagnosis faster. If we do that for long enough as humanity and there is data sharing the accuracy of the whole thing will increase a lot.

Sankozi2• 1 month ago

Testing healthy person for any illness by definition has infinite number of nines in false positive rate.

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

RobertoG• 1 month ago

The argument has some merits, but we should remember that, from the point of view of Bayes, you could apply the same argument to symptoms, which is only evidence. High odds of a false positive, means that you have not enough evidence, not that you have not useful information.

dkbrk• 1 month ago

You've got that completely backwards. Correctly applying Bayes' theorem, if an anomaly is observed you incorporate the prior into the calculation of the posterior probability. You don't just give up and say "the prior is miniscule so the likelihood is useless".

And then, even that's not enough. Decision theory needs to be applied to decide what action to take. That means taking into account the expected QALYs, cost and inconvenience across the distribution of possible outcomes. There's a whole spectrum of possible decisions, from immediately performing surgery, performing an invasive test like a biopsy, performing other less invasive tests, scheduling a follow-up non-invasive test at a later date, or just following a regular schedule of non-invasive tests and looking for any evolution along a longer time period.

The real problem is the binary thinking of either "we think you have X" and therefore tests must be performed or "we think you don't have X" and therefore tests shouldn't be performed. If medical organizations adopted empirically grounded decision frameworks, by applying them consistently doctors would be able to see something anomalous, assess that the risk isn't high enough to warrant immediate investigation, and be protected from a lawsuit in the unlikely case it was, in fact, something. And then we could do away with this "if we look we might find something" nonsense, which is pure fallacy.

torginus• 1 month ago

This is why you have multiple successive panels. If there's a disease that happens for 1 in 10k people, and you have a test with 1% FPR, 99 of 100 people will be false positive.

But what you can do then, is either run a more expensive, elaborate test or one that's proven to be statistically independent on the positive testing population.

FPR can even be a good thing. Let's say you have an expensive test with a very low false positive rate. Then you can mix together 100 samples, and get a test with a much worse FPR 100 times cheaper. Then you can repeat the same individually on the positive population.

This is fully automatic and you don't even think about it. Btw, this is why mass testing, and public healthcare can be better. You can amortize the cost of things across a large number of people for no disadvantage.

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 1 month ago

We could test symptomatic people.

convnet• 1 month ago

It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.

While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.

I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.

sroussey2• 1 month ago

If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.

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

jaggederest• 1 month ago

I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.

It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.

Beijinger• 1 month ago

"It's a controversial and complicated idea. "

It is neither controversial nor complicated to detect some cancers by scent.

Taking the "headspace" of something is also not really complicated.

There are people who can reliably smell/detect Parkinson:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...

david_shi• 1 month ago

I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.

There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.

More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.

wkoszek5• 1 month ago

All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.

The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.

rlt4• 1 month ago

every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan

Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?

risyachka• 1 month ago

> It's a controversial and complicated idea

sure, and there will be downsides.

But that data will be valuable nonetheless.

seer2• 1 month ago

Exactly - I had switched to a one meal per day setup and have been mostly following it for a few years.

Then after a routine “heart health” check all my indicators were super out of whack - the doctors thought I was on my deathbed - but I am perfectly happy pain free, in shape, physically active person…

Then _i myself_ had to dig into all these tests and figure out that they were measuring the wrong thing - since they try to time where your body is “just about to eat after a fast” - normally for most people in the morning before breakfast, but since my first meal of the day is usually around 20:00 - my body had adopted to have higher levels of various things just to stay on top of my lifestyle choices.

Anyway I had to educate some doctors since they haven’t really had a case like mine, so they weren’t thinking critically of how to interpret the results…

I imagine an automated test _could_ take these things into account with large enough dataset, but it would need to do a lot more reasoning than statistical correlation.

I do believe current sota models should be good enough to come to the correct conclusions with the right harness though.

vlfig• 1 month ago

You're absolutely right, and I share the frustration.

I'm thinking a possible solution to this signal-to-noise problem is to embrace the longitudinal view: instead of comparing each scan with the normal across the population compare only against past self, unless there's a risk factor that warrants it.

This way we could presumably make use of plentiful scan data and mostly look at the stuff that evolves in suspicious ways, not what looks suspicious.

RobotToaster• 1 month ago

This always feels like a thinly veiled excuse to ration healthcare. Would these same doctors refuse a full body MRI to a billionaire paying out of pocket?

Anything found can be monitored with focused follow up scans. It doesn't have to be immediately biopsied if it's in a location where that would pose a risk of iatrogenic harm.

newsclues• 1 month ago

All the reasons you’ve listed are excuses why my government healthcare stopped having annual checkups. But to me it’s just worse quality care

rzwitserloot• 1 month ago

One obvious alternative plan, presupposing that Full Body Scan is dirt cheap, is the following protocol:

- At 25 years old or whatever you get a FBS. Pretty much no matter what, this FBS will not be used to do more checks, procedures, and so on.

- ... and now we give you another FBS every so-many years, and only those things that are different from the previous scan are investigated.

There's still an issue with needless procedures, but the amount of 'weirdness that are not going to cause an actual issue had the patient never been aware' is significantly reduced by looking only at changes. i.e. most 'weirdness' shows up early and is fairly stable.

The difficulty is the moral issue. You cannot show that first scan to the patient. Even if every soul agrees beforehand that the rule is that nothing on that first scan, no matter how scary it looks, is further investigated... any medical issues raised by patients are used as a major information input for diagnosing issues. If I show a patient a scan that has this tumor looking thing on the left lung, then no doubt a few months later they'll be back complaining about shortness of breath and a pain on the left side of the torso. The mind is a powerful thing. At that point you can do a scan and see... the same nasty tumor looking thing we saw on that first FSB, and we're right back to the issue of these scans doing more harm than good.

Is it morally acceptable to hide that first scan from the patient?

josefrichter• 1 month ago

Sorry, but that's a morally corrupt idea.

davrosthedalek3• 1 month ago

The question is: If you have enough full body scans of many healthy people, and the statistical tools to model it (beyond "this range is OK"), whether this would reduce these false alarms to an acceptable level.

The real crux of it remains though: Let's say it finds something that increases your death risk by x=0.1%. Could you sleep? I'm not sure. Let's say the operation has 2x=0.2% risk. What do you do? What value of x makes this a problem for you?

tgsovlerkhgsel5• 1 month ago

That sounds like a problem with applying the wrong threshold for a positive finding, possibly due to liability concerns or wrong goals.

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

mrtksn• 1 month ago

In the rest of the world diagnostics aren’t expensive at all and medical data is centralized already (blood, MRI are almost routine for hospital visits, all data stored in govt systems).

During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.

friendzis3• 1 month ago

There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.

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

wkoszek5• 1 month ago

Other tests should be solved too (fecal/urine/blood). Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.

We already have patients trying to track their own health over longer time which is great. We then just have to make AI good enough to spot warning signs (without patients asking). Or parhaps we need to make those tests easy and cheap and regular.

khutorni• 1 month ago

walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab

Maybe take it out to dinner first?

EEBio• 1 month ago

There is this infamous DANCAVAS study [1] in which they ran cardiovascular screening on older population and found absolutely no benefit in doing so. Note that while the linked study claims there was a benefit to screening (reduced mortality in men aged 65-69), the apparent effect was caused by improper statistics (primary endpoint did not show benefit, only subgroup analysis, which however lacked statistical power to be reliable). And indeed, their follow up study showed that there was no benefit in the subgroup. [2]

Many a dollar is wasted every year on trying to prove population-wide screening prevents mortality or increases patients’ quality of life and every time we don’t cheat with statistics we get the same answer - population-wide screening isn’t effective.

1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208681 2: https://www.escardio.org/news/press/press-releases/No-signif...

seydor• 1 month ago

Theranos2

RandomLensman• 1 month ago

What does "solved" mean here? Identifying "the disease" correctly every time? On average identifying the right course of action? For each individual identifying the right course of action? Probabilistically or with certainty?

FridgeSeal• 1 month ago

With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses
> labeled with diagnoses

I know you’re not suggesting this is easy, but I can absolutely promise that the land of medical reporting, diagnosis and imagery is about a 1000x more complicated and unhinged than you might expect.

bozdemir• 1 month ago

This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.

hubraumhugo• 1 month ago

It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.

I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].

[0] https://sytse.com/cancer/

dodu_• 1 month ago

I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise.

But hey if not, actually cool.

Cyclone_2• 1 month ago

People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.

mNovak3• 1 month ago

This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.

My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!

Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.

On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!

intoXbox3• 1 month ago

MRI physicist here as well. I have a basic understanding of ultrasound, and this looks like an array of transducers organized to perform tomography, just as CT did for Xray.

However Ultrasound quality depends highly on transducer-skin contact.

Any physicists here to comment on the effects of sonar through liquid and the effects on image resolution and field of view?

apaprocki• 1 month ago

This paper, “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography”, goes into more detail.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

lambdaone• 1 month ago

This is precisely why you do it in water - the water-skin contact is effectively perfect, as is the water-transducer interface, and the body of water is easily characterizable; in effect you are scanning one large object that consists of a body of water that just happens to have a human body in it, and then extracting the body from that scan.

mNovak3• 1 month ago

The water is a clever impedance matching trick. The contrast in density between air and human flesh is high, so the waves all reflect off the surface rather than penetrating and reflecting off the internal structures we care about.

That's why normally you're concerned with really good transducer contact (squeezing out any air) or use a gel to match impedance.

I'm a bit rusty on CT, but I'd guess the resolution is proportional to the total number of transducers in the array (e.g. larger sensing surface equals tighter resolution) since you're basically taking a Fourier transform of the incident wave.

andrerath3• 1 month ago

Ultrasound researcher working on fast microvascular imaging here. Depends on the datarates, you can generally get pretty good blood flow data pretty fast, with <.5 seconds per slice if you do it with appropriate algorithms. A lot of this depends on motion though as you said, as the issue is generally getting a high-enough SNR (blood flow is generally 30-40 dB below tissue in energy, except for the biggest of vessels). Generally, higher frequencies have less of a separation between blood and tissue, but they have issue with attenuation. But I think with enough SNR (and with their element count that may indeed be possible), they could get pretty good blood flow data across the whole body.

rishabhpoddar• 1 month ago

I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!

aenvoker4• 1 month ago

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

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

autoexec3• 1 month ago

Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".

Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.

Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.

Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.

uberex• 1 month ago

This is a full body ultrasound?

Medical I don't care about futuristic sounding stuff. Just show me evidence based and clinically useful testing.

Use AI and new scans to help sure but prove it works otherwise this could be another dead end.

OkWing99• 1 month ago

For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.

raincole2• 1 month ago

It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.

frobisher• 1 month ago

we're hitting the hype peak shortly

bigcat12345678• 1 month ago

https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china

Remind me of this, radar based.

captainbland3• 1 month ago

I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.

The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.

It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.

ninjalanternshk2• 1 month ago

The spa approach also achieves what’s probably the key ingredient to making this useful medically — consistent data over time. We know the “what’s this fuzzy bit!?!” hysteria with elective scans can be counterproductive, but if you truly had monthly scans going back 2 years, the fuzzy bit could in fact mean something.

zxexz• 1 month ago

slide 28

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

i5heu3• 1 month ago

And slide 25, although it is questionable if this is really the result of such a device like Midjourney is presenting.

If it is then wow!

haldujai4• 1 month ago

This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.

It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.

More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.

Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.

This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.

intoXbox3• 1 month ago

Exactly, try can get a very limited FOV which is probably why they showcased it on arms/legs first

thih9• 1 month ago

But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.

Why don’t they approach this as a regular medical product?

With this spa angle I’m worried about hidden motives; perhaps data collection is a major goal. Or maybe this tech is not reliable enough.

inasio• 1 month ago

I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.

sevenzero• 1 month ago

Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong

teiferer3• 1 month ago

But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.

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

moozilla• 1 month ago

Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article:

As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.

teiferer3• 1 month ago

Yeah sure. That's not going to be a sustainable model. Once the tech is available and money is to be made, lots of for-profit alternatives will appear with marketing and lobby budgets that will take over the market.

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

atkrista• 1 month ago

Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?

n2h4• 1 month ago

Only if there's AI involved in some form.

razorbeamz• 1 month ago

This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.

keiferski2• 1 month ago

I have a mixed response:

1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.

2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.

3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.

4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.

raindropm• 1 month ago

The pivot to do things they want as AI research lab is perfectly understandable, but also..weird, like their loyal userbase are mostly creative people, and this pivot have ZERO things to do with those audience at all.

It also gives a vibe that they gives zero damn about to those creatives audience, or the things that made name for them in the past anymore, or that what I feel as their subscriber... I know that David Holz have his own unique way of doing things but it's still...weird!

oh, and the hypetrain on X. yikes..

keiferski2• 1 month ago

Yeah, exactly. This would have been a cool side project company from the founder and team.

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

leothetechguy2• 1 month ago

to be fair I wouldn't call people operating AI Image generators creative people. At best they're people curious about the technology itself, anybody willing to learn and do it for the sake of being creative does it themselves.

davrosthedalek3• 1 month ago

This is somewhat speculative, but as I see it, there are two ways to retain excellent people:

a) You pay them handsomely

b) You do shit they like, they way the like.

Sometimes it overlaps, of course. But this is essentially the reason why people stay in academia in the hard sciences. Most of us could earn considerably more in industry.

I'm not sure midjourney can compete with the bigwigs on a). But doing healthcare stuff is probably more fulfilling to the researchers, and with less "we stole from all the artists" vibes.

Of course, if this all works out, they might me able to do a) easily :)

pigpop8• 1 month ago

Personally, I think the bigger problem is successful individuals and companies deciding to just stick with their original business model and squeeze every drop of money out of it for their own personal enrichment.

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

altmanaltman3• 1 month ago

“we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.

this is pretty normal, i mean you have OpenAI and Anthropic trying the same as well. OpenAI is working on legal stuff [1] and also rolled out (or said they'll roll out) ChatGPT Health [2]. Then there was Sora etc.

These companies need applications for their tokens and someone has to build them. If they can win even with one, that's a net benefit for them no?

1 - https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/06/02/openai-targets-t...

2 - https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-health/

oinoom2• 1 month ago

we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall

My opinion is that the money is in the verticals as the models and harnesses built around them become commodities. Specializing in a vertical, especially where hardware is involved, creates a buffer between companies and the frontier labs. The frontier labs are spreading themselves thin trying to capture verticals like finance or legal but aren’t narrow enough to be as competitive as a company that is going for a more targeted approach.

andy99• 1 month ago

On the “we don’t know what to do”, I think it’s cool that they are trying something medical with it. Success obviously isn’t assured, probably it isn’t even probable, but I’m happy to see companies try this rather than launch yet another whatever or start a consulting business. I hope as the field (AI generally) matures, more people decide to try life changing stuff with it.

daralthus• 1 month ago

quite the opposite. it feels refreshing that ppl with talent and money can do inspiring things with it.

tclancy• 1 month ago

“To the man with a new hammer, all problems look like a nail.”

946789987649• 1 month ago

In a sea of AI products, the brand is still powerful though. Would I have clicked this if not for the Midjourney name? Probably not

aenvoker4• 1 month ago

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.

I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.

So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.

shishy• 1 month ago

yeah. they could have called it Medjourney.

pimlottc• 1 month ago

The branding choice is crazy to me. “Midjourney” is pretty much synonymous with “generated images that aren’t real”. Which is the opposite of what you want when it comes to medical imagery and data.

albingroen• 1 month ago

What the actual fuck

arrel• 1 month ago

This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.

Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.

armcat• 1 month ago

Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.

dostick• 1 month ago

THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?

manapause• 1 month ago

20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.

At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”

3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.

I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.

If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.

wxw• 1 month ago

Awesome work. The second video is great. I don’t know enough about medical science to consider viability and shortcomings, but I’m impressed by the dream. Keep cooking.

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

wartywhoa23• 1 month ago

Always trump with the savior card when bad PR¹ starts creeping in.

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

r0ckarong• 1 month ago

They should ask their LLM for fun things to do in prison! Or ask Elizabeth Holmes.

punnerud• 1 month ago

Why not have 5,6 rings at different levels and do it live in 3D?

cryo32• 1 month ago

Sounds like programmers woke up from a fever dream and decided they can come up with an idea and flesh out the details later.

otaviogood• 1 month ago

FWIW, I tried the prototype. It's very real. I scanned my hand and arm. It showed realtime images of slices of my hand as I dipped my hand in the water. Really amazing IMO. I think this will be a game changer when it comes out. It's just so easy to scan yourself.

shimon• 1 month ago

Did you get any interpretation of the imaging? It sounds cool (I'd take an ultrasound selfie) but it has to be medically useful for something before enough doctors grade enough images to kickstart the data collection for diagnosing more.

teekert2• 1 month ago

A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.

So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."

But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...

wkoszek5• 1 month ago

If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.

teekert2• 1 month ago

But what if most "masses" are cysts or other harmless structures that form during the 80 years we're walking around? I think that after about their 3rd useless biopsy people start to feel the problem with this.

Of course we can keep tuning and tuning the models, but in the limit it may well make more sense to wait for symptoms. At least that is the current experience.

Now maybe this machine will make sense in screening age 55+, 20 year+, 2 pack+ smokers for Lung lesions (where a much large portion of detected lesions are true positives). We do this currently with CT and this may be better or cheaper. But it doesn't look like it is, and it looks like far (very far) lower res than MRI (often the follow-up of a CT-scan).

joduplessis• 1 month ago

This looks remarkably dystopian.

rarisma• 1 month ago

Welcome back theranos

rdl2• 1 month ago

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.

If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.

Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.

(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)

rasmus16102• 1 month ago

It will be terrible for brain imaging. The ultrasound waves can’t go through the skull and thus can’t image the brain. Additionally you would have to drown the patient since you need a medium other than air between the ultrasound emitting probe and the body which is water in their device.

CT is more than sufficient for imaging the brain in a case of trauma and MRI is not automatically better than CT in every case.

(I am a neuroradiologist)

nirui2• 1 month ago

I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough.

Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth.

But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.

someothherguyy3• 1 month ago

water filtration seems like the easy part

laserbeam2• 1 month ago

No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.

nirui2• 1 month ago

Well... they certainly did not show that in the video.

Oh and yeah, there are more difficult problem. For example, if the platform moves to lower/lift people in or out the water, some people will probably fail to remain still or even start panic. This might effect the final image.

Not sure if Midjourney has way to counter that. Great if they do.

schmorptron2• 1 month ago

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains.

Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)

dsign• 1 month ago

It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.

The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.

At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.

Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?

jonplackett• 1 month ago

Are we at peak AI yet?

AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up

Kristencline2• 1 month ago

ER Nurse here:

This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.

The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.

So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.

These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.

Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.

I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.

What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...

Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.

I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve

deanc• 1 month ago

It’s valuable to have input of healthcare professionals here. I don’t disagree with the majority of what you’re saying.

However, the value add here is it can do your whole body a lot faster than doing a full body MRI (which would take hours at least?)

grego• 1 month ago

I'm sure I read that 30% will be immortal there, but suddenly the blog post changed... :)

hamburgererror2• 1 month ago

Midjourney Spa

Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms

schnitzelstoat2• 1 month ago

It reminded me more of Blade Runner, especially with the gold lighting.

hamburgererror2• 1 month ago

I feel confident I can pass the Voight-Kampff test

schnitzelstoat2• 1 month ago

As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

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

internet_points• 1 month ago

This is one of the creepiest "big AI" product launches I've read. I know it's becoming a meme, but that spa looks like something from a Black Mirror episode.

If they were just creating a new less-invasive and differently informative alternative to fMRI / PET / EEG / CT for researchers and doctors to use in hospitals, where experienced human doctors were given agency in finding out how best to use the tool and interpret the results (understanding all the caveats that go for full body scans, false positive rates and so on[0]), then that would be amazing, a tiny step forward for the human race. But packaged like this, eww.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580255

trolleski• 1 month ago

AI is about to find out the difference between talking and doing. Exciting!

lifeisstillgood• 1 month ago

In the early years of X-rays, doctors found all sorts of patients with major organ displacement, and performed surgery to, for example, hold the liver or kidneys “up”.

It took a while to realise that textbooks since Leonardos time had drawn and based anatomy on (dead) patients lying on a slab. But X-rays were taken with (alive) patients standing up. So of course there was a lot of “your kidney has slipped!”

I fully support and applaud this kind of medical innovation (even if … why midjourney?) but we need to be careful of the medical term VOMIT (victim of modern imaging technology). At some point we need a human doctor to say “calm down, live your life, eat right, exercise right, and accept that somethings don’t need to be panicked over yet - come back in six months”

dakolli• 1 month ago

They'll get so much money, all the 60 year old billionaires in SF are so desperate not to die.

alexcpn• 1 month ago

After reading this first, it looked almost like a joke, like how Google used to do Google- TISP Toilet Internet Service Provider https://archive.google/tisp/install.html

Even now without Xrays it is very hard to really even see if there are blocks in your artery usuing ultrasound (Echocardiography alone). Ultrasound is used indirectly by measuring blood flow difference between stress and rest - not a spa session anyway. Looks like a prank really

andrerath3• 1 month ago

3D Ultrasound helps a lot in this regard. Getting flow velocity out and tissue motion is very possible if you can support the data rates (in my group we've had some luck getting coronary artery 3D flow out using 3D ultrasound probes). The issue is that 2D ultrasound and flow is an unsolvable problem, so you really do need all 3 dimensions here.

yanis_t• 1 month ago

I can only applaud. Regardless of whether this device is possible, or economically viable, this is a brave move and a bold vision. Taking bigger risks is what what makes the advances possible.

niteshpant• 1 month ago

This is the most insane thing to happen to medical imaging

To understand Midjourney Medical (MM), think about current major options: - CT/X-ray: harmful if done too much && can't do for pregnant women - MRI: slow, have to stay still, no metal - Ultrasound: really low fidelity

Midjourney Medical is fast, high fidelity, and perfectly safe!

The holy trifecta.

Insane vision. Insane work. Hats off to the team

pera• 1 month ago

Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.

Why is that almost every LLM generated article sounds like a LinkedIn motivational post?

(this is not a rhetorical question, I would really like to know why, from all the writing styles, this is the most prevalent one)

tomasGiden• 1 month ago

Interesting but many issues which have been listed here are valid. This is my take on the largest of them.

Preventive testing is not always positive. False negatives creates a false sense of security and false positives drives unnecessary medical procedures. For example, what if this instrument sees "something" and a doctor then follows up with a biopsy, x-ray or explorative surgery. These will all have negative side effects. There has even been a debate of if mammography is a net positive. I think it might be but I'm just saying that even such a thing is debatable. The question is not only if the these early tests find anything, its also a question of whether detecting it early changes the prognosis. Maybe its untreatable anyway? Or maybe it would still be treatable if detected later? And then comes the cost of course, is it economical to do these scans on a population level relative to the alternative cost.

Building medical systems is not for the faint of heart. I was part of a startup building a Micro CT system with the long term goal of using it to detect tumors in biopsies live during surgery (1 um resolution for cm-sized samples) without waiting a week for the normal analysis. We also started with non-medical instrument (general research) and we never got to the medical instrument before we ran out of money (we engineers were too bad at sales). But we did study up on the (European) standards quite a bit. They are not crazy in any way. Its simply that you follow good engineering practice BUT it is hard to move from building a non-medical system to medical system after the fact. The standard is a process standard so it basically says "You should have followed this process when you designed your product". And you need be real careful setting your Intended Use and showing that you have Verified and Validated that your system can be used for the intended use. So most likely they need to build one product now (Body Composition Analysis), use that for research and then set up their Quality Management System before they rebuild everything from requirements to risk analysis to test plans to hardware to software. 10 years is probably on the low side for this and quite the cost.

Ameo• 1 month ago

Hell yeah, my AI image generation company is now running an alternative medicine AI MRI-alternative imagine spa. Hell yeah.

zx8080• 1 month ago

Thank you very much, Midjourney.

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

Or mid-dead.

alkyon• 1 month ago

We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.

ChildOfChaos• 1 month ago

Well that's certainly an interesting pivot, when Midjourney where set to announce hardware, who predicted this?

ali_m• 1 month ago

This is surely trolling? "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" has quite the acronym..

macleginn• 1 month ago

TL;DR: "Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body."

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

nelox• 1 month ago

Who needs a head anyway?

alpineman2• 1 month ago

Great, a hallucinated output that only the super wealthy can afford, only to waste doctors' time with the need to run every test again at huge expense. Can we not leave medicine to the professionals? Creating a ghibli rip-off is not the same as diagnosing cancer.

ixaxaar• 1 month ago

Well healthcare needs its own DLSS 5!

alpineman2• 1 month ago

I would just add that my wife is a doctor and in the age of AI it's truly unbearable. In addition to super long hours and stress they now have to deal with patients coming and thinking they know better than people who spent more than a decade in education because of what some chatbot told them.

laserbeam2• 1 month ago

Massive Theranos vibes.

You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.

The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.

vrganj• 1 month ago

So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something.

The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?

Jabbles• 1 month ago

This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:

a) it is possible to construct such a scanner

b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything

c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful

But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.

harrouet• 1 month ago

I have seen AI projects to convert a tomography into actual 3D models.

Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.

rasmus16102• 1 month ago

we don't even need AI for that: https://3dqlab.stanford.edu/what-is-volume-rendering/

mirthflat83• 1 month ago

We had this for a long time

perks_12• 1 month ago

i want a full body scan from the friendly discord app.

sagarpatil• 1 month ago

1) what?

iDon• 1 month ago

... It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. ... Together they act as both a choir and an audience

I think I'm not the target audience. I guess they are going to need to sign up a lot of people, to train on their scans + their medical outcomes. So the article is talking to people who will get enthused by it, which is more difficult after the question of 23AndMe data sale.

JackFr2• 1 month ago

I’m a weirdo who vaguely enjoys my MRIs. I’m moderately claustrophobic, but they still don’t really bother me. And I love the warming feeling that makes me feel like I’m getting microwaved.

IAmGraydon2• 1 month ago

What warming feeling? An MRI shouldn't really make you feel warm unless they're pushing IV contrast.

Ono-Sendai• 1 month ago

Wonderful stuff, good job Midjourney.

An AI can be trained on body scans to detect diseases, tumours etc. Ideally this can be trained on real scans with real diseases but you could also train on synthetic data (synthetic bodies and/or synthetic diseases).

You can also focus ultrasonic waves to destroy (vaporise or cook) diseased tissue.

Topfi• 1 month ago

This is very concerning:

Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.

Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated.

I have questions in general.

Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous.

Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought.

Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.

GTP8• 1 month ago

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive.

But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. But, at the same time, it is likely that it isn't a problem. And now, you will be stressed about the chance of having some health condition and spend time and money digging into a rabbit hole of what the issue could be, only to find out it was nothing.

They also don't say anything about the price of such a machine. If they really envision a future where everyone can easily get a scan, this is a crucial factor.

MPSimmons• 1 month ago

I learned this from watching House. I am certain that it's true, but I also kind of wonder how much backpressure there is against this kind of thing because the scanners are also insanely expensive to run per minute.

fastasucan2• 1 month ago

This backpressure is even with cheaper devices such as x-rays etc.

aeonik2• 1 month ago

Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature?

I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.

GTP8• 1 month ago

I think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.

fastasucan2• 1 month ago

Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.

muggesmuds• 1 month ago

Because a lot of things showing up in scans you wont know what is until you cut them out or do a biopsy. And even then you might never know if that thing would have progressed to become a problem. Scanning more will not solve that.

dtj1123• 1 month ago

Realistically this data is going to be used to train a closed source model, not to contribute to the scientific literature.

mapkkk4• 1 month ago

We can and do full body scans. Typically in the context of research, or for focus/metastasis search in current clinical settings.

The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.

Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.

I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.

However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.

Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

Good question!

Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication.

To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is that you'll see lots of lumps and bumps growing, and this could lead to lots of invasive checks. You can't not check because that's not fair "here is something that looks like cancer, if we grab it now it will stop you needing chemo. But it could just be a cyst."

So, its really really expensive to have 100k people getting monthly full body MRIs for 10+ years. Even more expensive to get them at the right resolution.

I think, that if these scanners are good and that is _Very much_ not proven. Then having a long term study would be good. I however have deep misgivings about how effective field array ultrasonic scans are, also safety.

I also do not trust midjourney, a company that exists through large scale copyright infringement to handle that data safely, ethically or in a way that would allow decent science to be done from it.

mlrtime• 1 month ago

Agreed, If you look for issues, you'll find them.

Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).

In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).

telesilla2• 1 month ago

I'm grateful that modern science can monitor and predict such issues, even if in the end there's no problem. The alternative, as we know for thousands of years without modern health care, is far worse for women giving birth.

I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too heartbreaking.

thebruce87m• 1 month ago

chances are that the scan will show something unusual

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

Saline9515• 1 month ago

The main potential of this technology is that it's easy and fast, unlike classic MRIs. So someone could do a scan a month without a problem.

zipy124• 1 month ago

MedLifeCrisis the youtube channel has a great video [1] on why you shouldn't full body scan. He's a consultant (highest level of doctor) in the NHS in England (and has done a PhD and research as is common in the UK medical system).

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

bondarchuk• 1 month ago

I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.

andrerath3• 1 month ago

SOTA ultrasound devices are still very expensive, with e.g. a custom 3D probe with a few hundred piezo elements costing well over 10k. IF they want to use MEMS probe instead of piezo (which is implied by them saying that they will use a chirp), that's going to be even more expensive, considering the lack of manufacturing know-how. When sufficiently scaled, I wouldn't say it is an exorbitant price for large research hospitals, but I am a little skeptical of rolling these out as a health checkup "spa" service outside of areas with extreme wealth concentration (e.g., Silicon Valley? Sure. London? Yeah; Minneapolis? not so sure.)

evrydayhustling2• 1 month ago

"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook.

Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good.

I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.

GTP8• 1 month ago

I understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.

khafra2• 1 month ago

If this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?

jappgar3• 1 month ago

Another reason is that we don't actually know what negative effects regular "scans" might have.

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

pigpop8• 1 month ago

As crude as it sounds, you don't know until you try.

igortg• 1 month ago

I thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that.

https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-...

As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.

spongebobstoes5• 1 month ago

those scans are one-off events, these scans are regular

the signal is improved by focusing on differences over time, instead of looking for insight from a single snapshot

in a production system, I look at the change log around incident start as one high signal way to diagnose the problem

I want the same ability with my own body. new pain? look for recent scan deltas, in conjunction with modern medical intuition

heironimus• 1 month ago

We already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things.

Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?

“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.

Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.

TuringNYC• 1 month ago

> But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan.

People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!

dperfect• 1 month ago

Overdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that.

Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.

Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.

wj• 1 month ago

This seems like something MLB teams would install in their locker rooms if it works.

pigpop8• 1 month ago

I agree, hopefully it becomes just like any other cheap and easy measurement like blood pressure. Most of the time, small changes and variations will be determined to be normal but having a record and a measurement allows you to determine what is abnormal or a symptom of a disease. It's the difference between having a measurement and having nothing at all (if you never got a scan with CT or MRI).

AbstractH24• 1 month ago

April fools 2027 is gonna be nuts

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

shireboy• 1 month ago

I have thought that extremely accessible, portable, non-radiation imaging would be revolutionary. Imagine every doctor - or even every person - had a handheld thing they could wave over your affected area to get a high res 3d image of the issue. Of course we have mri, xray, and ultrasound, but those are big and expensive. Obviously there are engineering reasons that is the case, but It seems like a concerted effort to make imaging more portable and accessible, coupled with ai to help analyze could bring about all sorts of follow-on health improvements. Your regular practitioner could check you for heart blockages, clots that lead to stroke, cancers etc as a matter of course. I’m not sure stepping into a golden vat of water is what I have in mind but medical imaging does seem like a possible area for drastic innovation.

UltraSane• 1 month ago

Actually doctors tend to frown on people getting full body MRI scans with no symptoms because they tend to cause many false positives.These false positives often trigger a stressful cascade of unnecessary follow-up imaging, bloodwork, and invasive biopsies.

IshKebab• 1 month ago

I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though??

Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI.

The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.

tmhrtly• 1 month ago

You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.

sobiolite• 1 month ago

Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not.

Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.

jappgar3• 1 month ago

Today only I'll sell you 6GB of data for 6000USD its a steal. Buy now.

jermaustin12• 1 month ago

Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.

In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it.

As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment).

What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege.

Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!

logravia• 1 month ago

False positives are the primary issue. False positives lead to stress, invasive diagnostic procedures and wasted medical resources. Look into the debate about what is the appropriate age for mammographies and how Apple Watches have resulted in overdiagnosis of heart conditions.

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

rvrs• 1 month ago

A) proactively keeping me healthy,

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

michaelscott• 1 month ago

This happens in a number of medical systems of countries across the world and is perfectly feasible, usually through premium subsidies for stuff like planned check ups, buying certain types of food and even installing equipment to monitor your driving behaviour. The thinking is that encouraging customers to be healthy reduces premium claims in the future

hombre_fatal2• 1 month ago

To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege.

Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.

Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?

AbsurdCensor• 1 month ago

I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.

jon-wood2• 1 month ago

Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.

noduerme2• 1 month ago

Okay, you're worried about too much data and false positives, but that's a problem you can get around by smoking a pack a day and not going to the doctor. The vast majority of people on the planet have exactly zero hard data on their ailments, and even if they spend their life savings trying to get a clear picture they may never have one.

Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.

mr_mitm• 1 month ago

After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image.

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

santiagobasulto• 1 month ago

The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.

monkeydust• 1 month ago

If you ask people to rank say 5 things from top to bottom where the first thing at the top is what they are least cost conscious about and the one at bottom is what they are most - I would bet health would at the top slot for most of us. So relatively we would spend (whatever we have) on our health versus other things if we had conviction on the outcome.

estearum• 1 month ago

The best thing you can do for low cost is 1) eat better food and 2) move more

"More data" is quite literally irrelevant.

aimanbenbaha• 1 month ago

Everything you want in your desired healthcare system can be stored as data.

moduspol6• 1 month ago

The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.

I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?

Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.

nlkkjhlkjsd• 1 month ago

I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.

But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.

I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.

nancyminusone3• 1 month ago

I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes?

Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?

MichaelZuo• 1 month ago

That is a good point. There’s no point arguing about how well the map correlates with the territory… if the map isn’t even in your hands yet.

christina97• 1 month ago

GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data.

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

mawadev2• 1 month ago

I hope it doesn't proactively Xray me 5 times a day

cseleborg3• 1 month ago

It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.

Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.

lanstin2• 1 month ago

data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochondria, receptor shapes, expressed proteins, etc.). If this company was a bunch of biology grad students getting the AI bug, I'd be hopefully curious, but for a bunch of "generate images" folks to try to go back from low-res images to biology, seems a bit naive. Like not knowing how much DNA and RNA information there is in the body naive. I'm sure their leaders are good at financial engineering, but for effectively "proactively keeping you healthy", mmm, maybe not.

Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc.

As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.

mawadev2• 1 month ago

I want to give my money to actual individual doctors who studied this for a decade, have the work and life experience to make informed judgements and decisions to reason about my health. I dont want to pay a company to digitize my body and then sell the data back to me

ineedasername• 1 month ago

How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.

MadrasThorn• 1 month ago

A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not

You want technology to train you how to avoid environmental factors and then give you treatment?

we're still very far away from eliminating humans in the loop from medicine.

idontwantthis• 1 month ago

All I want is the safety that, if something is wrong, treating it won’t bankrupt me.

cromka2• 1 month ago

That's like saying you don't care about the hundreds of kilobytes of your DNA biome you can obtains nowadays for nearly free, you care about being healthy.

My man, YOU USE THOSE bytes for that purpose exactly.

kamma4434• 1 month ago

Medical Doctors: scans on healthy patients are not a good idea

Tech bros: hold my beer…

Imustaskforhelp• 1 month ago

Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes.

I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators.

It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself.

There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.

hermannj314• 1 month ago

You don't need to build a perfect med spa, you only need to control the patents of the key pieces of a med spa.

This is nothing more thab a prophylactic patent grab to stifle competition and progress in this space for the next decade and/or hoover up patient data behind a paywall where they will gladly lease the weights and bias cure to you own disease back to you in the form of a subscription.

neuroelectron• 1 month ago

So this is the purpose of building the backroom pools

owenthejumper• 1 month ago

Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school.

Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator, if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infinite amounts of variations in human bodies, which means even the best models focus only on segmenting known organs, and leave anything unknown alone.

khafra2• 1 month ago

In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy.

It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.

saghm• 1 month ago

It's not unreasonable to think that the level of acceptable risk for "the language model parsed my text wrong" is in average much higher than "the medical model misdiagnosed my condition". You can probably come up with scenarios where a language model behaving unexpectedly would have drastic consequences if you imagine them hooked up to automatic systems where they have immediate control over actions that can't easily be reversed, but like, that's why it's a bad idea to use them like that, and they're the exception rather than the rule. It seems plausible that scenarios like that for medical models are a lot closer to the norm than the exception, in which case the tolerance we have for them "filling in the gaps" incorrectly would need to be much smaller.

nicoburns• 1 month ago

If something like this became commonplace (and accurate enough), then it could be fantastic for research: enabling us to map out what variations are common and which aren't in a way that hasn't previously been feasible.

deadeye• 1 month ago

This is more true than people realize. My wife and I got full body MRI scans.

Both showed "possible" medical issues. My though was "Great, I have a baseline, in two years I'll get another one and compare".

My wife on the other hand got a bit obsessed about her results and had what was probably an unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.

I suppose you could argue that another way...better safe than sorry...but the stress that is caused by known uncertainty vs unknown uncertainty can be too much.

gbrito• 1 month ago

...unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.

The point here is many issues can't be resolved safely with a biopsy or minor procedures, so one ends up under serious risk of a major surgery for something that would never cause any damage.

Plenty of people die this way. If not, one might even thank his doctor for saving his life afterwards.

andrewla• 1 month ago

Not a doctor, but the overdiagnosis concern is at the intersection of three phenomena:

1. Imaging is expensive, just in dollars and time, even without analysis

2. Imaging is not without impact -- CT scans, especially full body scans, expose the body to ionizing radiation

3. Imaging is time-consuming

The net result of these means that full body scans are difficult to interpret. If a doctor given a patient complaint suspects a condition that is sufficiently non-specific that a full-body scan is required, then the scan will be interpreted through the lens of the known progress of the differential diagnosis. And typically these scans must be done without a healthy baseline, so minor findings in this context might have significant diagnostic power when combined with history or other findings.

But on a healthy patient, minor findings are very likely to be noise, because we don't have a great deal of experience with scans of healthy people, for the reasons above.

This technology, if it pans out, gives a way of inverting 1, 2, and 3. If every healthy doctor visit includes one of these scans, then the medical field gets experience interpreting them, and more importantly, when new symptoms occur, previous scans can be compared to determine whether a particular finding in the current scan is new or has changed.

wouldbecouldbe• 1 month ago

HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.

meindnoch• 1 month ago

Theranos 2.0?

randusername2• 1 month ago

Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.

This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop.

You have to hire an army of expensive compliance people (cheap ones aren't nimble enough for startups), develop the whole thing start to finish under strict design controls, and usually throw a lot of time and capital into convincing regulators your very innovative and disruptive new R&D endeavor is actually derivative enough to draft behind some existing medical device.

spongebobstoes5• 1 month ago

do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong

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

Cthulhu_• 1 month ago

It needs approval from someone to ensure it's safe first and foremost - health & safety inspections, hygiene, FCC approval, etc.

And FDA approval (I presume) if they want to give formal diagnoses, but I believe that if they don't get that it'll fall under the "alternative medicine" umbrella, which is very broad. But they can do whatever under that umbrella as long as it's safe.

StarlaAtNight• 1 month ago

I wonder how doctors feel about people consulting ChatGPT. I know a doctor who can't stand people getting medical advice from quacks on TikTok, but that's probably a different problem/pattern

jcmontx• 1 month ago

Let's say you do a diagnostic based on the results of this machine. Later, patient suits and you have to answer for your diagnostic. If the only evidence for your diagnostic is coming from a non-FDA approved machine, you're liable.

randusername2• 1 month ago

You can't have any impact at all if you can't legally operate it or if you are hamstrung in your marketing claims.

Chatgpt is just words. This is an ultrasound imaging system. Who knows what could go wrong: blown out eardrums from feedback, acoustic burns, wild inaccuracies that lead to misdiagnosis.

There's really no way around documentation as a way of collecting evidence that the team knows what they are doing. Things like enumerating all the possible patient risks, assessing their severity, updating the design to mitigate, and ultimately testing that it works as intended.

This is why you can't just bolt on the medical device part. Most devs will have a conniption if suddenly expected to attend lots of meetings and do a lot of paperwork. Different skillset and very expensive to switch out your whole workforce.

renegade-otter• 1 month ago

That may be true, but the FDA is no longer run by fiduciaries of the United States.

baggachipz• 1 month ago

Just grease the right tanned palms, and you're good to go!

nDRDY• 1 month ago

For reference, OP is talking about the 510(k) process. One of the issues with that process is that an approved medical device may end up with a whole tree of "derivative" devices approved through the 510(k) process. If that original device is then found to have problems and has its approval removed, those derivative devices do not also become unapproved.

s1artibartfast2• 1 month ago

It sounds like they are trying to fly under the FDA thresholds for regulation as a medical device and be considered a low risk "wellness device" which makes no medical diagnostic claims and has low risk. This is why it is in spas and not doctor's offices.

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

FDA may consider certain products that use non-invasive sensing (e.g. optical sensing) to estimate, infer, or output physiologic parameters (e.g. blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood glucose, heart rate variability) to be general wellness products when such outputs are intended solely for wellness uses, and provided they:

• are non-invasive and not-implanted;

• do not involve an intervention or technology that may pose a risk to the safety of users or other persons if specific regulatory controls are not applied;

• are not intended for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, prevention, or treatment of a disease or condition;

• are not intended to substitute for an FDA-authorized, cleared, or approved device;

• do not include claims, functionality, or outputs that prompt or guide specific clinical action or medical management; and

• do not include values that mimic those used clinically unless validated (e.g. manufacturer testing, peer-reviewed clinical literature) to reflect those values

Brosper• 1 month ago

They will do everything but not release the API

post-it• 1 month ago

So it's what, computational ultrasound? Why are they making it sound so much like they're going to steal my kidneys?

angoragoats• 1 month ago

What the hell is wrong with companies these days?

you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body

No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.

Applejinx• 1 month ago

This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.

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

Yokohiii• 1 month ago

Interesting choice to draw "inspiration" from the chambers of Niander Wallace, the main antagonist in Blade Runner 2049.

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

elAhmo• 1 month ago

Not sure why people keep posting links to X videos when they are available from at the official announcement post: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

World's first trillionaire doesn't need more money or influence in destroying people lives, let's do a small step at a time and not use X.

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:

- This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo.

- They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true "full body" in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that's why we use CT for lung screening!)

- The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite - small, deep structures.

- "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians, but I in general have no problem with people collecting data on themselves where they can. To me it's similar to heart rate monitors or home blood pressure cuffs. The main issue here is education, so that patients know what the data is and is not telling them. The more complex the data, the more difficult that is.

- Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that "it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs", I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.

nixie• 1 month ago

Couldn't have said it better.

conroydave• 1 month ago

this is why i always come to hacker news for the expert opinions. thank you for being critical yet optimistic.

b40d-48b2-979e7• 1 month ago

You don't know if the opinion is expert. You don't know who that person is or what credentials they even have. Blindly trusting something that sounds right is a terrible way to inform yourself.

vmg12• 1 month ago

"Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians

For a lot of these things I wonder why they don't just do multiple scans just to see how things develop. Is it a cost issue?

fridder• 1 month ago

Cost, time, and for things like CT's, trying to limit your radiation exposure

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

That's generally exactly what we do, which if we need to follow 2x or 10x incidental lesions in the population, leads to cost and availability problems. A lymphoma patient in remission needs follow up scans too, and I don't want them to have to wait 3 months because thousands of people are now following up their benign adrenal adenomas.

joshgel• 1 month ago

This is definitely a part of standard follow up for small findings and part of the guidance for incidentally detected lung nodules smaller than <8mm.

I think mammography is a great example. Many people are quite surprised to hear that the Positive Predictive Value of a screening mammography is only in 10-15% range. This despite mammography being a pretty sensitive test. This is because despite good test performance characteristics, applied across a large population of relatively health people, the 2-5% false positive rate is a large number of people.

paduc• 1 month ago

Because people discovering "Incidentalomas" will be too freaked out to wait "just to see how things develop".

queuebert• 1 month ago

Statistically overdetection leads to poorer outcomes because interventions have a risk as well. That's why everyone doesn't get a yearly full body CT scan, for example. The current guidelines are based on optimizing for maximum good, and believe it or not some things are best not known about because the risk of dying from it is about the same as the risk of the treatment.

iandanforth• 1 month ago

Not a physician. Some observations on these statements.

The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have."

The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?"

Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to look at things has a tendency to reveal information that we never knew we needed.

For example, for years I thought of blood sugar as something that was either in a good or bad range. Then I tried a continuous blood sugar monitor. The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening. There's so much more to learn when you get a higher resolution (temporal in that case) view into your body.

Another wonderfully hopeful example is the retinal imaging ML work done by google. A completely non-invasive image of the retina for diabetic issues, that also happened to be able to predict things like age, sex, smoking status, previous cardiac events and more! Just take high-res pictures of things! The body is interconnected in ways that you can infer from one system so much about others.

So while I don't think anything the Dr. said is "wrong", I think it represents a very common blinkered mindset of pragmatic practitioners who need to deliver reliable performance daily.

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

Your points are well taken, and I think this is the fundamental struggle of anyone who works in a narrow and deep field. It's truly difficult to see things from a different point of view sometimes. It certainly could turn out that this ultrasound setup gives truly new information, but, it isn't really a new way of generating an image, it's the same physics we've used to generate images from sound waves for decades, and that modality comes with some pretty hard physical limitations that this demo does not directly address. Time will tell, if they don't run out of money. I'm hopeful!

dominotw2• 1 month ago

The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening.

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

mrandish10• 1 month ago

It's true that sometimes deeply experienced professionals are less likely to discover or accept novel methods based on new approaches or technologies. Unfortunately, in this case MJ's proposed product is being deceptively presented to appear as if it's the kind of bold new approach we all hope to see in medicine - but it's not. It's a repackaging of an existing product that's already on the market.

MJ is buying the transducer chips used in Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device (it's not an R&D license, they're literally buying the same chip). The repackaging is to turn it into a contactless, 360 degree-at-once, 60 second full body scanner. Every aspect of the repackaging provides the same singular benefit over the Butterfly device: convenience. Unfortunately, every aspect of the repackaging has the same two downsides: lower resolution (meaning lower diagnostic value) and higher cost.

Spoiler alert: moving the imaging transducers 200-400 times farther away from your organs and introducing a large volume of water between the transducer and your skin in no way improves resolution or diagnostic value (quite the opposite (exponentially!)). Having 40 transducers on a hula hoop ring that far away offers no value over having one transducer much closer and moving to as many angles as necessary to image the volume of interest - except it might be a few minutes faster.

So, this isn't an "exciting new approach to medical imaging." It's a marketing repackage of an existing medical product into a non-medical, higher-cost, 'spa experience' with trendy, tech-adjacent appeal and vaguely medical-ish window dressing (it's carefully disclaimed has having no medical value in this form). Since the exact same chip is already available in a much less expensive, far more ideal form that's fully repositionable to any angle, is closer (and can deform skin to get closer still), the real question is how much medically-relevant diagnostic value could MJ's repackage of the same chip offer over the existing better, cheaper implementation? Butterfly's version is already FDA approved with proven diagnostic value. And all of MJ's hype around 'AI-powered' isn't about improving diagnostics, it's only necessary to recover at least some signal from the hurricane of noise and multi-path issues created by the adding MJ's cool-looking convenience features. But slowly being lowered into that tank with the neat ambient light ring sure looks sci-fi, right?

VikingCoder3• 1 month ago

They spent a lot of time selling the spa, and not a lot of time showing us the data.

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

That's because there isn't any data yet, at least not enough from real patients to be meaningful. I would love to see some of the raw imaging data they have generated though, if that's what you mean.

omnivore• 1 month ago

I'm far more willing to trust someone in the field every day (you), over keyboard warriors who want to validate their new toy is alive.

ChrisRR2• 1 month ago

I'm not a medical doctor at all, just an engineer who works in medical devices and I'm definitely sceptical about this.

I'm not totally sure of the value of an imaging system that only gives you very low resolution images if they're not accurate enough to determine anything from. You'd need a secondary CT or MRI anyway so why not skip to that?

My real concern is the dependence on external servers to reconstruct the images

Edit: From reading other people's comments, people are acting as if this is the first device trying to sell itself as improving pre-diagnosis imaging and this is totally revolutionary. This is not, and if any of the other products have convinced the entire medical industry that frequent imaging is beneficial then neither will this

smith7018• 1 month ago

"why not skip to that?" MRIs and CT scans are expensive, require referrals, and you usually can't get them without believing you already have an issue. If this technology can get to a point where it's high enough resolution, cheap enough to just have at spas, and shared across the world then people will be able to know if/when they should get that secondary scan before symptoms start.

FriedPickles• 1 month ago

ultrasound is not CT

They're using "CT" in its literal sense: tomography*, using computers. In this case, ultrasound is the penetrating wave rather than x-ray. It is of course a very different thing than what the medical world knows as "CT" today.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomography

aghilmort2• 1 month ago

we can do tomography on any round-robin-rectify multi-pov source, doesn't have to be x-ray is just de facto use in medicine, closer to at min marketing ed problem

kensai• 1 month ago

The problem is the other way around. That we somehow accepted that X-Rays/Röntgen is the only way to do CT.

iaw• 1 month ago

I have a friend who may be dying. It's not cancer but equally dangerous. They caught it early but they're powerless to do anything. We're just watching, waiting, and hoping.

SubiculumCode• 1 month ago

I do a lot of MRI analysis including segmentation of small structures in the hippocampus called the hippocampal subfields. To collect these segmentations, we collect partial-field-of-view high in-plane resolution T2-weighted images on a 3 or 7 Tesla magnet. These sequences are generally only included in research protocols if the research specifically cares about hippocampal subfields...therefore they are rarely collected. There have been attempts to enable segmentation of these small structures using lower resolution T1-weighted scans, leveraging deep-learning or other models trained on concurrent T2w high resolution scans and the lower resolution scans within the same subject, allowing the model to predict the higher resolution information from the lower resolution inputs. This produces spectacularly beautiful segmentation on shitty data. Data whose resolution is about the same as the thickness of the structures you are segmenting or less. The problem is this: 1. The lower resolution image barely has any information in it on these smaller structures 2. The accuracy of the resulting segmentation depends entirely on how much the person fits the training distribution. But much research is on specific populations: children, autism, etc. 3. Some big names in imaging analysis tools have published these tools, lending their credibility to them. 4. The beautiful segmentations and (3) tend to convince non hippocampal experts that the resulting data is trustworthy, especially to an eager beaver researcher trying to maximize the impact of their already collected datasets.

I've rejected a number of papers for this.

But my point is this. Midjourney Medical might train a model to produce pretty images with this technique, but the more they need to depend on deep-learning models to get usable data, the more that the match between the training distribution and patient will matter.

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

This is a critical point. I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?

haldujai4• 1 month ago

The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited.

Radiologist as well. Remember this is full wave inversion not pulsed wave B mode. You can get much more useful information from both high low frequency and capture transmitted waves.

There is promise with this and we use it for example with MRgFUS. With advanced computational models or patient specific CT/ZTE MR aberration correction it is theoretically very feasible to image the brain with ultrasound, whether that’s more useful than say portable low field strength MR is a different question altogether.

This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT.

Not to be pedantic but since this is a tech forum I would clarify that FWI US is computed tomography by definition (at least in this and many applications). Gas degrades conventional CT too, it’s just worse with US as you have little to no forward propagation and of course innumerable interfaces in the lungs to reflect and scatter.

code51• 1 month ago

What does "more useful" mean in this context? Can you solve gas-filled bowels with the mode difference?

jmhmd10• 1 month ago

Yes, I was thinking about FUS as well! There are clearly ways to penetrate bone, but I have not seen it used for imaging, only for ablation. But I am not an expert there and it sounds like you have more knowledge in that area than I do.

Pedantry appreciated.

TheOtherHobbes• 1 month ago

What's the use of FWI for a moving target - which someone floating in a spa most definitely will be?

This is a fever dream, not a practical diagnostic technology.

I can imagine it being useful if you happened to own an imaging product and wanted to train a model on human body shapes and sizes.

But dunking people in a golden spa - why golden? why not pink or teal? - and waving a ring of US over them, at distances which make high resolution impractical, to tell them their medical fortunes is... eccentric.

I'm being scathing because there's no solid science behind this, and if there had been solid science MJ would have published it in a paper.

This is pure marketing. And if you're going to do that, you should at least include some dolphin petting.

ErroneousBosh• 1 month ago

"Incidentalomas"

Good word for it. We were a bit worried about something that showed up my my mum's scans, as if an inoperable tangerine-sized lung tumour wasn't a big enough problem. It was a round dot about the size of a pea on her adrenal gland that lit up like crazy in contrast dye. Now, that as you probably know was a worry because oh shit, lymphatic system involvement, that's going to spread like crazy.

But after two years of immunotherapy, and about six years after being detected while the lung cancer is gone, the pea is still there, still as bright as ever, neither getting bigger nor smaller.

No-one is in a hurry to poke at it and see what it is, just in case that turns out to be a mistake.

89 this year and at least got to see her grandchildren start primary school, so good work from your lot and the oncologists!

Now I know it's an "incidentaloma" :-)

dennis_jeeves22• 1 month ago

Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine,

True. My more nuanced take on it: For most chronic conditions (including cancer) diagnostics have improved but resolution has not. The PR machine of course hypes things to make it seem like we have more cures today that in the past. What is have is more diagnostics and more procedures.

tedggh• 1 month ago

This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it

sltr• 1 month ago

"when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging

dmd• 1 month ago

Counterpoint: When you're not looking for things, you don't find them.

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

andai2• 1 month ago

Super cool. Reminds me of Mary Lou Jepsen's (who did One Laptop Per Child) company Openwater, which is using some kinda infrared holography, also as an alternative to MRIs.

Supposedly they can be made lightweight and wearable.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen#Openwater

barretts• 1 month ago

I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.

Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.

Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.

I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.

bawana• 1 month ago

Imaging is not preventive care. Exercise is. Good food without chemicals is. Good sleep is.unfortunately these important parts cannot easily be monetized to provide stock options to the insiders/

u8• 1 month ago

I won't have an opinion until Brian Johnson tells me how much younger this makes him.

cseleborg3• 1 month ago

You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

dwa3592• 1 month ago

You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.

SpyCoder77• 1 month ago

There is no way I am letting an AI image generator take scans of my naked body

Mitsuwa• 1 month ago

I thought this was a satire at first

qudat• 1 month ago

Anyone know the song that's playing in the demo?

danso• 1 month ago

At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.

Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.

wyck• 1 month ago

How much is a scan going to cost? The video motions petabyte per scan? These types are scans (medical images) are extremely dense and large in size, storing short or long term images sounds like its going to be extremely expensive when combined with AI analysis, etc. Not to Mention the cost of operating a Spa is not cheap, especially if your buying real estate, and the cost of the machine itself.

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

lukeinator42• 1 month ago

I think the scanner outputs petabytes of raw data that then get processed down into images, so you would only need to store an image per slice ideally, kinda like MRI DICOM files.

tbryant• 1 month ago

Yesssssss, AI overlords put me in your dolphin technology powered human deep fryer.

freeplay• 1 month ago

Elysium is playing out right before our eyes

tehjoker• 1 month ago

This is like the plot of the movie Elysium

thomastraum• 1 month ago

they call it Promethean Spas... Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver.

perdomon• 1 month ago

"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed."

Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.

arrowleaf• 1 month ago

There are huge backlogs of folks for imaging... Radiologists aren't exactly sitting around daydreaming all day waiting for a patient.

thaw13579• 1 month ago

They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...

aghilmort2• 1 month ago

one nice thing may be way to enhance penetrative ultrasound eg smaller immersive ultrasound tomography in smaller dip tank hey stick your leg in this thinner immersive tunnel , e.g., extremity up-close immersion or trunk wrappers vs just wand-based?

Cort3z• 1 month ago

If this all works, and becomes widely available, I wonder if people would get a lot of health anxiety. Now they can see stuff that is normal, but strange or unexpected.

I’m no doctor by any means, but what if, as an example, an organ fluctuates in size, or composition, naturally. A medical professional would know these things, but a random person off the street might get stressed out and start to panic, or perhaps overcompensate with their diet or something.

I think more data is generally good, but data without context or insight can be problematic.

ElijahLynn• 1 month ago

I just cried watching that intro video!

It's like, wow, us humans have a new tool to help us be our best!

Beautiful!

dmitrygr• 1 month ago

MRI & CT go from captured data -> displayed image via real provable hard math.

This seems to imply that there is an LLM layer involved. Which means hallucinations. No thanks.

consumer451• 1 month ago

I have zero medical knowledge, but assuming that they go through a good regulatory approval process, why is everyone so negative?

These are smart people trying something new. They are bootstrapped.

How is that not cool? Isn't this exactly the type of thing that should be exciting?

thenakulchawla• 1 month ago

I personally have been dealing with an elbow injury for over 3 years. I have been to all the known places in the bay area and shown it. One surgery, countless doctors (some who took MRIs), and many physiotherapy sessions later the problem still exists.

I believe if a willing doctor takes images all over the elbow, and looks carefully, they will find the cause. But they aren’t willing.

Disappointed with the healthcare here, I for one, would love a solution that takes comprehensive data of my body and tell me what’s going on.

Midjourney Medical

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