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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#431

Post by internet_points »

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

Re: Midjourney Medical

#433

Post by charcircuit »

arcticbull wrote: post #283
hereme888 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your…

That doesn't sound like a useful test then. Instead use tests with fewer false positives.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#434

Post by KeplerBoy »

drum55 wrote: post #257
gpt5 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.

That's likely the datarate of the ADC chips. You would downsample them directly on the FPGA board and maybe perform an FFT or similar transform. 16 TB/s across a few dozen FPGA boards is nothing crazy. After some early stages in the signal processing you might transfer 1 or 2 TB/s over ethernet to the servers. Entirely feasible considering we have 800 gigabit/s ethernet.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#436

Post by cleaning »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #233

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…

[dead]

Re: Midjourney Medical

#437

Post by moffkalast »

seer wrote: post #423
convnet wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 the…

If the current state is anything to go by, an automated test would not only flag your out of distribution results but try to gaslight everyone reading its output with additional false indicators to map you into an area that's in distribution. Statistical models cannot accept the existence of extremely rare edge cases.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#438

Post by vlfig »

convnet wrote: post #287
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #233

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…

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…

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#439

Post by kakwa_ »

david_shi wrote: post #332
convnet wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 d…

A sample size of 3 is hardly statistically significant.

From what I could found, billionaires die on average at ~83 years old. ( https://strygin.substack.com/p/how-billionaires-die )

It's not far off what a decent health care system is able to provide in most wealthy countries. It's even somewhat lower actually.

It's difficult to assess the risk factors, but in the end, I have the feeling their additional medical staff and their ability to "cut the queue" (S. Jobs-style) just barely offsets the additional common risk factors (stress, long hours, segregated life), specially if we compare to the upper-middle class.

In the end, there is no magic $100M pill giving you 10 more years. And in truth, access to food, drinking water, a non-toxic environment and really basic healthcare & medicine (vaccines, antibiotics) probably already brings you at a fairly high life expectancy.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#440

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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”

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