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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

751–760 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#751
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vari…

"the people can't be trusted with knowledge" is a bad argument we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently collect data passively. when a medical condition arises, you have a data source to correlate against the onset of the condition currently we have almost no data, so doctors need to run multiple tests to identify possible causes

> we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently

So your take is we just do the testing and ignore it's outputs entirely, until something comes up? And that is somehow different and better than current imaging processes?

> currently we have almost no data

This is absolute fucking nonsense.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#752
> You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only relevant implication is the word “useful”. Clearly we want useful data, that’s obvious.

There is no indication that the data being sampled by midjourney is useful.

The root level comment is talking about their general vision of healthcare. We’re talking about ideal goals here.

Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#754
post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late. In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it. As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to…

Even those annual blood tests can be problematic. When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high. A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist v…

I have 2 autoimmune disorders/diseases, and I have spent the last 2 decades managing them. One of them (thyroid) is relatively easy, take my synthetic thyroid hormones ever day, and check my levels every 3 months to make sure I'm still good. The other is symptom management, which is less consistent, and a flair up from one causes the other to flair as well. And flairs are particularly hard to handle and function well.

> I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.

I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know if the opinion is expert. You don't know who that person is or what credentials they even have. Blindly trusting something that sounds right is a terrible way to inform yourself.

Bayes Theorem...the chances this rather milquetoast and balanced analysis was written by someone with no knowledge is vanishingly low IMO.

With LLM tools being widely available, it's extremely high, imo.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#756
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.

> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd. Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”

It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.

This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.

They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#757
post #683

Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist: - This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo. - They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve a…

They spent a lot of time selling the spa, and not a lot of time showing us the data.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#758
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes? Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?

This is a bit of a contrived example. The “megabytes per second per dollar” is clearly in reference to their scanner technology that the say generates terabytes worth of data, with the goal of a scan taking around 60 seconds. So I’m confused about exactly what your point is? That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds…

I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.

I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayes Theorem...the chances this rather milquetoast and balanced analysis was written by someone with no knowledge is vanishingly low IMO.

With LLM tools being widely available, it's extremely high, imo.

Idea for a website/documentary -- have experts respond to a piece of news, or provide commentary. Put a few expert pieces alongside a few LLM outputs, have people guess/work out which is which. Have the same people tell you why.

If on a website, rank the results; present the 'how I worked it out' info for the best spotters (and you could interview them). Keep the answers secret for a few weeks, then reveal them in a way that the game is still playable.

It's repeatable, every few months you could interview new experts (or the old ones again), get new models.

Kinda like the critical thinking version of images of a pelican on a bike.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#760

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…

That sounds like a problem with applying the wrong threshold for a positive finding, possibly due to liability concerns or wrong goals.

To work, it would have to be incredibly accurate (specifically, have an incredibly low false positive rate).

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