Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#851

Post by jmhmd »

mrandish wrote: post #828
jmhmd wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Given that current ultrasound probe technology (including butterfly) relies on the probe being essentially in contact with the tissue being imaged, it’s hard to imagine how this set up can be effective with the imaged volume so far from the transducers, since there will be a huge amount of dissipation in the water bath, but maybe they have found a way to solve that? Also, I imagine that the quality of the images, such as they are, will fall off very quickly in larger patients. Will be interesting to see.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#852

Post by jhatemyjob »

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?

If I had the means, and if it was as convenient/pleasant as this, I would absolutely get an MRI every month.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#853

Post by andrewla »

owenthejumper wrote: post #607

Almost 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…

Not a doctor, but the overdiagnosis concern is at the intersection of three phenomena:

1. Imaging is expensive, just in dollars and time, even without analysis

2. Imaging is not without impact -- CT scans, especially full body scans, expose the body to ionizing radiation

3. Imaging is time-consuming

The net result of these means that full body scans are difficult to interpret. If a doctor given a patient complaint suspects a condition that is sufficiently non-specific that a full-body scan is required, then the scan will be interpreted through the lens of the known progress of the differential diagnosis. And typically these scans must be done without a healthy baseline, so minor findings in this context might have significant diagnostic power when combined with history or other findings.

But on a healthy patient, minor findings are very likely to be noise, because we don't have a great deal of experience with scans of healthy people, for the reasons above.

This technology, if it pans out, gives a way of inverting 1, 2, and 3. If every healthy doctor visit includes one of these scans, then the medical field gets experience interpreting them, and more importantly, when new symptoms occur, previous scans can be compared to determine whether a particular finding in the current scan is new or has changed.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#854

Post by doctorpangloss »

reverius42 wrote: post #174
doctorpangloss wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I read the site and it seemed pretty clear? It's a 3d, transparent, high res image of your whole body reconstructed from the wave data from a large number of high frequency ultrasound scans. But it's also a high end spa in San Francisco that softly scans your body. Then, you uh, do as you want with the data (presumably show it to your doctor, who will be perhaps bemused)?

Sometimes I cannot wrap my mind around how funny people can be and how utterly humorless HN has become with its downvoting. @dang this is valid for the community too!

Re: Midjourney Medical

#855

Post by Forgeties79 »

adastra22 wrote: post #849
Forgeties79 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now we’re going down a different path. Telling people to go burn through mountains of cash to get tests they don’t need is not ethical.

Costs me less than $1000 so far…

Almost half of the US population doesn’t even have $1000 saved away nor do they have insurance that covers these tests. It’ll be far more expensive unless insurance deems it necessary, which none of what you’re suggesting would be by definition.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#856

Post by jmhmd »

zdw wrote: post #806
jmhmd wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's generally exactly what we do, which if we need to follow 2x or 10x incidental lesions in the population, leads to cost and availability problems. A lymphoma patient in remission needs follow up scans too, and I don't want them to have to wait 3 months because thousands of people are now following up their benign adrenal adenomas.

If you could dramatically reduce cost and improve availability, would this still be a problem? What's the limiting factor that prevents medical imaging from getting cheaper and more available?

The machines are expensive (millions range per MRI scanner), staffing the machines nearly around the clock with highly educated technologists, repair/maintenance of expensive specialized machinery, radiologists to read each scan (esp with a current shortage), means it’s very expensive to set up and run an imaging center. Opening and owning an imaging center used to be seen as fairly lucrative. and many radiology private practices did just that, however, the economics have changed over the years with dropping reimbursements, staffing shortages, etc and now often these imaging centers are seen as a liability rather than an asset.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#857

Post by Kotlopou »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #533
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> femtometer resolution The diameter of a carbon atom is 154 picometers. Nobody's going down into the femtos. And you're not going to get atomic resolution, either, because humans move around too much and things like scanning electron microscopes need very stationary samples. Even microscopic vibrations can blur the final image. Which isn't to say that you couldn't get very good resolution...

Just for illustration: Gravitational wave detection is on the femtometer scale. The proton is about that size. We can measure these things, but the machines are, let's say, "big".

Sigh...

LIGO detects length changes of 10^-18 m, or attometers, not femtometers, which are a thousand times longer. (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts) But this does not matter at all, because this is not resolution of the body image, but the size of the vibration on the speaker. That's a technical data point that I don't see any reason to include in this presentation other than to cause this exact confusion.

The video looks in general like it's trying to impress by giving a lot of incidental information about how the device works while being very light on what it would be able to actually see -- e.g., it doesn't matter how many gigabytes your device collects if the resulting image is blurry.

Compare the website of LIGO (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts), which also has a lot about the technical marvels (huge vacuum tubes! precision engineering!) but crucially includes the goal of this all.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#858

Post by KaiserPro »

pigpop wrote: post #782
KaiserPro wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication. To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is…

The entire point of this machine seems to be to do non-invasive scans that don't have the type of side effects that constant CT scans would have and which are vastly cheaper and easier to do than MRI so that you can collect longitudinal data on any/all individuals. Finding "lumps and bumps" or incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI, maybe your doctor w…

> The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief

the full body MRI was developed in the NHS/university along with CT scanners. But let us not pretend that modern companies have been acting in a way that is ethical. OR that there exists a legal framework that fights for the rights of normal people.

> incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI

They are a problem because we have no real data on cancer incidents that don't develop. (https://ima.org.uk/24626/making-sense-of-cancer-with-profess... buried in this article)

Biopsies are not risk free. General anaesthetic carries a risk. You'll be on antibiotics, the wound will have an infection risk. Also the build up of scar tissue is a real issue.

This is the ethical issue. Because suspicious lumps will need investigation, no ethics board is going to allow not investigating.

This also fucks up the data.

Its not impossible, but it needs sensible thought, thought from actual medical professionals, rather than a company who is at best operating in a legal grey zone.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#859

Post by moffkalast »

fragmede wrote: post #786
multjoy wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation very much needed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1iz4iwm/chatgpt_is... or https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1oesnix/chatgpt_di... or if you prefer from this site, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171639 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999632 If you were looking for a published paper or something more official though, I don't have one.

Maybe something that isn't completely censored anecdata? At best these fall into "well known diseases with obvious symptoms that overworked, incompetent, or simply sexist, human doctors missed" and not actual rare cases.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#860

Post by haldujai »

jmhmd wrote: 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…

> The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited.

Radiologist as well. Remember this is full wave inversion not pulsed wave B mode. You can get much more useful information from both high low frequency and capture transmitted waves.

There is promise with this and we use it for example with MRgFUS. With advanced computational models or patient specific CT/ZTE MR aberration correction it is theoretically very feasible to image the brain with ultrasound, whether that’s more useful than say portable low field strength MR is a different question altogether.

> This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT.

Not to be pedantic but since this is a tech forum I would clarify that FWI US is computed tomography by definition (at least in this and many applications). Gas degrades conventional CT too, it’s just worse with US as you have little to no forward propagation and of course innumerable interfaces in the lungs to reflect and scatter.

Post reply on HN