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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

211–220 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#211
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences. Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.

> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.

On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> they have no hope for commercialization. Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.

This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably

Re: Midjourney Medical

#213
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…

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#214
post #117

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?

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 wors…

Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#215
post #65

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!

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.

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#216
post #65

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!

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#217
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!

Re: Midjourney Medical

#220
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 inc…

This is fair, but I think it's better stated as you did than couched in language suggesting it's a matter of principle.
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