What the hell is wrong with companies these days?
> you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body
No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.
Midjourney Medical
661–670 of 927 posts
Re: Midjourney Medical
#662> 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…
I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.
But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
LNT is the null hypothesis. No one disagrees a linear model fits the data very well in high doses. If you want to argue that model doesn't work in low doses, you need a model with more parameters and sufficient data to fit it. The issue is that, at these low doses we want to differentiate, we're also looking at effect sizes that are hard to separate from noise, and sampling biases that are hard to erase. There's stil…
Well problem is that humans are so noisy through lifestyle, enviroment and genes that any proof for either is really hard.
Another problem is that there haven't been natural experiments in low dose exposures the way there unfortunately have been for high dose exposures.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#664So, 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 ren…
"I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in https://x.com/SebastianCaliri/status/2067452733356122303
I can't see how ultrasonic tomography can actually get anywhere near the resolution or penetrative depth that MRI can have.
Also The other thing I am unsure of is what the health effect of dumping you into an industrial scale ultrasonic cleaner. For example you can have doppler to measure blood flow in real time, but you can't do that for early pregnancy because of some health reason or other.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook. Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrowe…
I understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.
This is exactly why it's a bad idea. I agree that if this technology comes to fruition, it should be in every clinical and research setting as a tool for us to further our understanding.
It shouldn't be a commodified test anyone can do at any time they feel like it. There are so many examples this leading to over or misdiagnosing already. I've seen patients who thought they had diabetes because they got a CGM over the counter and it showed a blood sugar spike during exercise (as in, their body doing exactly what it was supposed to do). He also now avoids oatmeal because "it spikes my blood sugar". Surprise: reddit and tiktok are awash with such stories as well.
I've seen a patient who on a whim decided to get 24hr blood pressure monitoring done, and thought they have severe hypertension because their systolic reached 170 when they were climbing stairs and during a football match because they were cheering and shouting.
In a similar vein, there are shady practicians who offer full body MRI scans, and fMRI brain scans to the well-to-do as a way of diagnosing things, when in fact neither are specific enough to actually diagnose something on their own.
23andme tests sending patients into clinics because they found a specific SNP that may be associated with worse outcomes for a disease.
We have neither the resources nor a specific enough technology (scan shows something: not specific enough to tell us what it is, but it sure is something) to unleash these for the general population to use.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#666So, 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 ren…
> Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own Is it? Linear No Threshold has largely been rejected at this point. https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed....
Weekly CTs are going to give you cancer
Re: Midjourney Medical
#667Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school. Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator , if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infi…
This is more true than people realize. My wife and I got full body MRI scans.
Both showed "possible" medical issues. My though was "Great, I have a baseline, in two years I'll get another one and compare".
My wife on the other hand got a bit obsessed about her results and had what was probably an unnecessary procedure to biopsy something, which turned out to be benign.
I suppose you could argue that another way...better safe than sorry...but the stress that is caused by known uncertainty vs unknown uncertainty can be too much.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#668This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.
Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode abou…
> I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. No its not. This is extremely paternalistic. Humans know how to understand noise and statistics. You don't get to decide that for me. I want more lives saved with more information.
It’s not paternalistic. It’s reality. Most people are not equipped to vet all the medical information that comes their way. That’s why we should talk to our doctors about results.
I don’t think my mechanic is being paternalistic when he talks through my car and what is/isn’t important. I like that helps me prioritize things. Why is this any different? In the end a person can tell a doctor “I don’t care run the test” or whatever so what’s the big deal? You can still do what you want. Get that biopsy if you need the peace of mind.
Re: Midjourney Medical
#670I 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…
We already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things.
Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?
“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.
Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.