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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#91

Post by d_burfoot »

verandaguy wrote: post #4

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 t…

> 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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#93

Post by throwaway219450 »

themantalope wrote: post #67
bhouston wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Would it be suitable for basic body composition (as they claim in TFA)? DEXA is a big business and companies push a subscription model where they encourage you to get monthly scans. The results are really fun to look at and the dose is admittedly very low, but you're still getting rastered by an x-ray. It would also explain the spa angle and hence why they're doing that before going for regulation.

> We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.

As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3770049/

Re: Midjourney Medical

#95

Post by abtinf »

tptacek wrote: post #50
jdw64 wrote: post #39

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.

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.

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#96

Post by milchek »

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#97

Post by jawns »

themantalope wrote: post #34

radiologist here - example images don't look great

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

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

Re: Midjourney Medical

#100

Post by verandaguy »

tptacek wrote: post #41
sandworm101 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).

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

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