I was wrong about the Midjourney ultra-sound scanner

https://twitter.com/MattZirwas/status/2068365802491834541

by MrBuddyCasino • 1 month ago

89 54 1 month ago

https://xcancel.com/MattZirwas/status/2068365802491834541

2 things:

1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.

2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.

oliculipolicula2• 1 month ago

Rather, helpful tests become convenient

Buried in tlb's response might be the J-curve, the S-Curve (=integral of J-Curve), the hype curve, and finally Braess/Jevon/Baumol: why is healthcare inflationary if it is so helpful and so needed. The tension between helpfulness and perceived necessity must be explored, ceterum censeo (3.)

https://xcancel.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2068434810872496453#m

FinnLobsien• 1 month ago

There’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.

In general, I think we should applaud this though.

Any genuine attempt to create novel medical technologies is probably a good thing (assuming they’re non-invasive and non-painful).

Unless it’s a Theranos situation, I think it’s a great thing to attempt, even if it fails. So many things we rely on today are the result of a successful attempt, but the failures were just as necessary for the eventual success.

That ambition is very positive to me.

bradgranath3• 1 month ago

It's a Theranos situation.

>That ambition is very positive to me.

...and this is why people fall for it. Every. Single. Time.

Literally everything they're saying is marketingslop gobbledegook. No studies, no papers, no doctors; just "500k transducers," and "30fps!" Anyone can wire that up. With a little cash, you might even be able to stream, record, and proccess it. Still means absolute diddly squat if you haven't compared it to other imaging or figured out how to train a radiologist to use it effectively or done trials for specific diagnostics or diseases.

They'll figure out if it does anything other than show you an animated cartoon xray of yourself later. After they have your money.

bradgranath3• 1 month ago

Name some other groundbreaking medical equipment that was brought about by VC funding, please.

fastball2• 1 month ago

That is a pretty wild disparagement this early. A Theranos situation is one where fraud has been committed. Theranos itself would not have been a "Theranos situation" if, after making initial bold claims ("we're gonna do a full blood panel with a drop of your blood"), they had tried to make it work, failed, and then been upfront about that. But they committed fraud and the rest is history.

With regards to Midjourney Scanner, you have no evidence that any fraud is happening or is likely to happen with this device. AFAIK they haven't actually made strong claims about what this will be capable of in a medical context, so fraud would be quite hard at this stage anyway. As such, it seems unreasonable to expect them to already have done studies with doctors.

gpm• 1 month ago

You can't compare it to other imaging technologies, train radiologists on it, or do trials for specific diagnostics until you've wired it up and built the device. If you demand that you do that before building the thing you can literally never create anything new.

A theranos situation is one where you're lying about what you have reason to believe the new device will do - saying it will do things that you have no reason to think are even plausible - that you have prototypes doing the thing even. Not one where you're merely experimenting with something new that might or might not pan out.

vinyl7• 1 month ago

I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutions

bradgranath3• 1 month ago

Or maybe, because it's not really useful for much.

winrid• 1 month ago

This is AI right?

adastra22• 1 month ago

Everything long form on Twitter these days is.

LearnYouALisp• 1 month ago

and never mind on Medium

jti107• 1 month ago

one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.

the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat

noobermin2• 1 month ago

Given the incentives (an ai booster account who is also prompting chat to write his posts) does this even belong on HN? I feel like our standards have dropped so much in the last two years.

nl2• 1 month ago

If you don't like the post, say something about the post itself. At the moment your criticism sounds like "I don't like this world we live in"

drdeca• 1 month ago

The criticism of “these posts are AI generated” seems like something that is about the posts themselves?

applfanboysbgon• 1 month ago

It takes ten times longer to point out all of the things wrong with an LLM-generated post than it does to generate it. This is a losing battle and a miserable way to spend one's time. It would be preferable to simply not see zero-effort generated content drowning out real content, but because the zero-effort generated content outnumbers real content 100:1, it requires a high degree of active moderation intervention that sadly isn't present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

jmward01• 1 month ago

I'm not a doctor but (Isn't there always a but after someone saying they aren't a doctor?) it seems to me we need three things to bring in a true revolution:

- imaging that can get down to the cellular level easily and often.

- the ability to process that imaging data to find issues effectively.

- the ability to act on that data in a minimally invasive way.

This is a step in the right direction for one and two and the third has had progress too by others. We aren't there yet, but I can see a future where individual cells are treated and at that point all sorts of things are possible.

colingauvin2• 1 month ago

The problem is there's an inverse relationship between penetration of the sound waves and the frequency.

physPop2• 1 month ago

and the heating

the__alchemist• 1 month ago

But the only way to find out was to have invasive, risky procedures to biopsy or remove what was found.
And overall, the side effects from all the risky, invasive procedures to track down the over 90% of stuff that was harmless equal or outweigh the benefit from removing the less than 10% of stuff that wasn't harmless.

I accept this (well-used) perspective from a practical, current perspective, but not for abstract diagnostics generally. From the Bayes' theorem, and same logic you use in Kalman filters: More knowledge, if you have data on the confidence, always helps. It only causes these negative outcomes due to acting poorly with the data (e.g. due to emotions and liability concerns, I suspect here)

oliculipolicula2• 1 month ago

The most practical Bayesian counter (indep of matters of confidence) might be the info bottleneck:

  to generalize accurately, one must forget (irrelevant) details

The risk (bottleneck) is in throwing out the relevant details

bsder• 1 month ago

Tech folks have a very ... unique ... perspective on things. The following conversation would not be unusual for a tech geek--"Oh, they found something on that scan, so I need to get it looked at once a week for a month or two. Okay. Shrug.*

That is NOT a typical patient response. Go run that in front of any doctors and watch them laugh you out of the room.

1) When most people see something medical flagged, their first reaction is PANIC.

My friend's wife had something flag on her mammogram--the biopsy later showed it to be benign. In the meantime, her anxiety drove her blood pressure to something like 175 over 130 and they had to up her anxiety and blood pressure meds until the biopsy came back. Her probability of stroke was way higher than her probability of breast cancer. My grandfather had a little blood in his urine from a slowly growing bladder cancer. He forced them to treat it in spite of the fact that he was in his mid-80s, and the probability that cancer would kill him was zero. Instead, he basically died feeling miserable from the cancer treatments 6 months later.

2) Most working people cannot take off the amount of time necessary to do a weekly set of followup medical appointments for a couple months. Again, this is very different from tech geeks who can pretty much throw their work schedules around pretty flexibly.

madrox• 1 month ago

I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."

The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.

And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."

notatoad• 1 month ago

The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.

when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.

hn_throwaway_992• 1 month ago

yes, that's the power of reputation.

No, it's not just about reputation, at least for me it's about the fact that there is a relatively strict, FDA-approval process for actual medical devices. Midjourney's announcement was the equivalent of a marketing page for some supplement that claims it will make be sleep great while growing my penis (the page even basically even marketed it as a "wellness" product), not actual scientific evidence that the device would, or could, work as advertised.

BobbyTables2• 1 month ago

Even damn X-Rays cost more than $100.

Something like this will never cost patients $100. Even if the actual cost to a provider was $5, patients would be billed $500 after insurance…

shrubble• 1 month ago

Two years ago I paid $60, CASH, no co-pay, no insurance, for X-rays of my hips. They were all digital and I got the interpretation (which was included) before I had finished driving the hours' drive home.

democracy• 1 month ago

Midjourney seems useless these days, not even sure why would anyone use.

Legend2440• 1 month ago

MidJourney has better style than most other image generators, especially for artistic images.

Unfortunately it hasn't kept up on image quality, detail, or text rendering. I think this is because they don't have the $ to keep up in the scaling game.

Aurornis• 1 month ago

Interesting that this Tweet is trending on HN, because it’s rather empty of actual details.

There have been a lot of more thoughtful analyses of the scanner circulating on Twitter that have actually highlighted the real problems with what they’re claiming.

An example of an important point brought up by someone with actual domain expertise is to point out that ultrasound doesn’t travel well through bone or air. Once you realize this, you understand why they chose the slices they picked for their marketing images. Get up toward the rib cage and lungs and ultrasound isn’t going to be doing the magical things they claim.

Even this post hedges with “if it’s high resolution” claims, but we already know what the resolution looks like. You can see the images they’re producing and they’re pretty rough. They’re using sensors from another ultrasound company so it’s not like they made a breakthrough. The concern now is that they’re going to start trying to make up for the limitations of ultrasound by having AI process the images into something that looks more impressive and hides the limitations of the technology.

I don’t know why this particular Tweet is trending, because it doesn’t seem to add anything at all to the conversation. If you spend any time on Twitter this feels like template engagement bait designed to ride a popular topic without adding anything to the conversation.

hn_throwaway_992• 1 month ago

Another thing that had me sort of scratching my head about this tweet were these sections (emphasis mine):

If the Midjourney ultrasound is high resolution, harmless, inexpensive and convenient, people can get an initial scan...
If the MIdjourney device can be repeated frequently, like weekly, at a low cost and is harmless..

This particular author is backtracking on his original idea that lots of frequent scans are bad, as long as they are cheap and accurate. But that's a pretty irrelevant side issue IMO when the vast majority of objections I've seen to Midjourney's announcement have been that qualified folks just don't believe the tech is medically feasible - it won't have the necessary resolution to discriminate findings.

I'm not faulting the author, who was quite clear where he did a rethink, but I do fault people who somehow think this is evidence that Midjourney's scanner will be viable.

TBH, while I don't think the Midjourney announcement is the same level of malevolence as Theranos, I don't think it was quite far off. I'm baffled that people think science and medicine should be done by a flashy website and PR-speak instead of the sober language of research reports, but I guess that's just a (sad, IMO) sign of the times.

senordevnyc• 1 month ago

the vast majority of objections I've seen to Midjourney's announcement have been that qualified folks just don't believe the tech is medically feasible

The original Midjourney Medical thread here on HN was loaded with people confidently declaring that these kinds of scans are a bad idea and net negative because of the risk of false positives.

porridgeraisin• 1 month ago

A collection of opinions on this in a radiology dedicated publication, which seems much more productive than engagement slop:

https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h...

pu_pe• 1 month ago

The fact this Midjourney delusional device is taken even slightly seriously is a major sign that we are in a bubble. A lot of people are pointing to Anthropic and OpenAI's investments into datacenters as problematic, but I think it's this ancillary scam ecosystem of things that truly don't have any intrinsic value that's much more dangerous.

mchusma• 1 month ago

For those not following the debate of X, there have been a surge of doctors who are saying that full body scans are net negative.

The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad including risky biopsies. Some have gone so far as to literally state early detection does not lead to better outcomes (simply not true - genuine early detection is very helpful but what they mean is it is outweighed at the population level by false positives).

The counter argument is that more information is always good but that you must learn to handle the noise, and we should focus on improving how we handle false positives. Including, but not limited to more frequent and abundant scans of various types.

The reason this is trending is because it both includes the argument and feels nice that someone changes their mind.

Personally, I think a lot of the issues here come down to the fact that we lie about the statistics instead of just show them. A test is neither positive or negative. It’s x% updated probability that you have something.

tim333• 1 month ago

The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad

Maybe we need better treatment of the results rather than less scans?

I was wrong about the Midjourney ultra-sound scanner

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