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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#112
post #85

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?" 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 act…

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#113
post #97

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.

[dead]

Re: Midjourney Medical

#115

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?

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

Re: Midjourney Medical

#117

radiologist here - example images don't look great

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

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

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

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

Re: Midjourney Medical

#118
post #90

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 acti…

[flagged]

Re: Midjourney Medical

#119
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

Re: Midjourney Medical

#120
post #85

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?" 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 act…

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.

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