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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#821

Post by mrandish »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #729
conroydave wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why i always come to hacker news for the expert opinions. thank you for being critical yet optimistic.

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.

I'd agree more if MidJourney had decided to announce their product plans with a white paper instead of glossy 'product vision' marketing spin and virtually no information as to how they hope to solve the vast technical leaps necessary to convert the transducer chip they licensed from Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device into a contactless, 360 degree, 60 second full body scanner.

Given MJ's extraordinary claims and lack of detail, I thought the GP's response was well-calibrated, especially given MJ's unfortunate choice to lean into vaguely implying this has 'medical' utility, despite providing zero evidence (or even plausible theory) their approach could ever have diagnostic value greater than Butterfly's FDA-approved, handheld, full contact USB pocket scanner which is available now and plugs into a mobile phone. They are using 40 of the exact same transducer chip (designed for full contact use) from 200-400 times farther away. You can use the existing full contact Butterfly scanner today and just move it to 40 different angles. It would take a couple minutes longer, provide vastly greater resolution and is proven to have diagnostic value.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#822

Post by arrowleaf »

perdomon wrote: post #820

>"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed." Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.

There are huge backlogs of folks for imaging... Radiologists aren't exactly sitting around daydreaming all day waiting for a patient.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#823

Post by thaw13579 »

perdomon wrote: post #820

>"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed." Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.

They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...

Re: Midjourney Medical

#824

Post by lanstin »

dominotw wrote: post #775
iandanforth wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a physician. Some observations on these statements. The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have." The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?" Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to…

> The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening. you were surprised to find out that stress and carbs raise blood sugar?

I'm doing this now, and the thing I find most surprising is that there seems to be some invisible persistent state that gives high or low sugar a sort of momentum - so if I've been doing a fair amount of physical activity for a month, I can lay slugabed for two days and still drive to have a slice of pizza in the afternoon without trouble; but if I've been slacking on the activity piece, or arguing with my spouse, or travelling and eating a lot of dubious things, I can walk five kms to a pizza place, eat the slice, walk the 5 kms back, and it will still spike. Also I have issues with the CGM being higher than the prick-blood test, like 40 points higher rather consistently. A1C is still dropping, but the CGM numbers are more directionally accurate than numerically accurate.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#825

Post by aenvoker »

keiferski wrote: post #348

I have a mixed response: 1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it. 2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels - off , somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named…

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.

I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.

So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#826

Post by nativeit »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #819
cscheid wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to point out that you are posting from a 5-months old account (squarely within a time frame where LLM-powered accounts would be created), with an UUID-sounding username, claiming a 10-year-old professional history in the field, and using those credentials to bring up the possibility that a 14-year-old account claiming to be an MD with `md` in the username and _lots_ of comments is LLM-generated and asking for…

Congrats, you've discovered people are always joining an anonymous platform, and some want pseudonymity? If I put "md" in my name, am I suddenly a doctor then? Your reading comprehension needs some work, I've been working for 16 years and it isn't being used as a cudgel to appeal to authority, but sharing some context about who I am and what my perspectives are.

The parent comment is demonstrating the exact type of internet savvy critical thinking that you’re ostensibly arguing for, but you seem to be reflexively defensive.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#827

Post by Barrin92 »

nihonde wrote: post #536
Barrin92 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing. And nope this isn…

Something doesn't add up. The entire Japanese healthcare system is built around the idea that preventative testing for asymptomatic conditions is effective. You can read all about it, if you want. Personally, I think you've swallowed some kind of health insurance industry black pill, whether you know it or not.

>You can read all about it, if you want.

I don't need to, I've lived in Japan and done the Ippan Kenshin which is the once a year health checkup. It consists of getting your weight, height blood pressure measured, an eye test, urine tests for diabetes and a blood test for cholesterol. That's very reasonable.

The one thing some doctors still tend to do is a chest-xray, which is not reasonable. They do it because tuberculosis was widespread in post-war Japan and they just kept doing it, but it has no positive impact on mortality rates.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#828

Post by mrandish »

jmhmd wrote: post #765
VikingCoder wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's because there isn't any data yet, at least not enough from real patients to be meaningful. I would love to see some of the raw imaging data they have generated though, if that's what you mean.

> I would love to see some of the raw imaging data

Just look at images from the Butterfly IQ3 handheld ultrasound device which has been on the market a while (https://www.butterflynetwork.com/iq3). Midjourney is repackaging 40 of the exact same chip around a big, non-contact ring. Since MJ is placing the devices 200 to 400 times farther away from your organs and sending sound waves through a large volume of water before contacting your skin (instead of a thin smear of gel) the images will be much lower fidelity.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#829

Post by mindcandy »

Jabrov wrote: post #133

They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd. Is this some AI hallucination post?

Lots of folks in here calling out the "billion scans a month" and skipping over the "capable of" part.

They're not claiming they'll perform a billion scans. They're trying to build enough machines that if absolutely all of them were run at 100.00% capacity it would be theoretically possible to do a billion scans a month.

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