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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

641–650 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#641

> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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. This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop. You have to hire an a…

do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today

It needs approval from someone to ensure it's safe first and foremost - health & safety inspections, hygiene, FCC approval, etc.

And FDA approval (I presume) if they want to give formal diagnoses, but I believe that if they don't get that it'll fall under the "alternative medicine" umbrella, which is very broad. But they can do whatever under that umbrella as long as it's safe.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#642

> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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. This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop. You have to hire an a…

do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today

I wonder how doctors feel about people consulting ChatGPT. I know a doctor who can't stand people getting medical advice from quacks on TikTok, but that's probably a different problem/pattern

Re: Midjourney Medical

#643

> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body. This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to hea…

The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.

I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?

Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#645
post #570
post #560

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive. But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. Bu…

Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature? I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.

We can and do full body scans. Typically in the context of research, or for focus/metastasis search in current clinical settings.

The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.

Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.

I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.

However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.

Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#646
post #237

So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?

No, you stand there for 60 seconds. If every hospital had one, even if they sat idle 90% of the day, thats enough to hit that target.

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion scans ago was last month?

It does not work this way.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#647
post #604

> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body. This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to hea…

>A) proactively keeping me healthy, This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible

To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege.

Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.

Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#648
post #614
post #560

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive. But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. Bu…

I thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that. https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-... > As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance…

those scans are one-off events, these scans are regular

the signal is improved by focusing on differences over time, instead of looking for insight from a single snapshot

in a production system, I look at the change log around incident start as one high signal way to diagnose the problem

I want the same ability with my own body. new pain? look for recent scan deltas, in conjunction with modern medical intuition

Re: Midjourney Medical

#649
post #560

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive. But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. Bu…

Overdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that.

Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.

Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.

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