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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.

Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would…

If you seriously think this is a realistic scenario, you should call your doctor and tell him you've decided you have cancer and would like to order chemotherapy. See what he says.

Nobody is deciding for themselves to do chemo because they think something looks funny on a scan. All the scan gives them is a reason to talk to their doctor, who will do all the usual due diligence before deciding on treatment, if any.

And on the flip side, I hear stories all the time of people who DO have symptoms but they get dismissed by their doctor as stress or food allergies or whatever until it's too late. Maybe if patients were armed with a scan that shows a mass at the site of their abdominal pain, there would be fewer of these horror stories.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#892
post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of MRI analysis including segmentation of small structures in the hippocampus called the hippocampal subfields. To collect these segmentations, we collect partial-field-of-view high in-plane resolution T2-weighted images on a 3 or 7 Tesla magnet. These sequences are generally only included in research protocols if the research specifically cares about hippocampal subfields...therefore they are rarely colle…

This is a critical point. I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?

> I am curious what the team building this looks like? Do they have ultrasound physicists and clinical practitioners in addition to the AI researchers?

Related to that point, I was so turned off by Midjourney's post about this because it absolutely reeked of all the red flags I've seen over the past 2 decades when Silicon Valley-types try to "disrupt" the medical field. The post was titled "Midjourney Medical", but it approached everything from a "wellness" perspective, i.e. how can individuals "optimize" their health by numerous scans/tests/analyses, it's a spa not a clinic, etc. etc.

Where were the research papers? The peer-reviewed articles? If you're truly trying to "disrupt" some area of medicine, it doesn't make you immune to the peer-review process.

I'll fully admit I'm not qualified to assess the claims made in the article, but if Midjourney wants to be taken seriously, I would hope they would avoid an approach that looks a lot more like Theranos in their early days, vs a sober analysis of how their tech compares to existing standards of care.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#893
I have zero medical knowledge, but assuming that they go through a good regulatory approval process, why is everyone so negative?

These are smart people trying something new. They are bootstrapped.

How is that not cool? Isn't this exactly the type of thing that should be exciting?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#894
I personally have been dealing with an elbow injury for over 3 years. I have been to all the known places in the bay area and shown it. One surgery, countless doctors (some who took MRIs), and many physiotherapy sessions later the problem still exists.

I believe if a willing doctor takes images all over the elbow, and looks carefully, they will find the cause. But they aren’t willing.

Disappointed with the healthcare here, I for one, would love a solution that takes comprehensive data of my body and tell me what’s going on.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#896
post #875

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What does "more useful" mean in this context? Can you solve gas-filled bowels with the mode difference?

Full wave inversion uses all of the information from the wave and more intense computational tomography to image structures that pulse wave B mode cannot, though gases are still a problem. Computationally, if you squint, it's similar to the work Midjourney does with AI image generation, as it progressively generates a structure that fits the data. Ultrasonic waves can penetrate most structures in humans, including th…

Ultrasound researcher here: this work is almost certainly not full wave inversion. You're right that FWI can be done in this kind of setup. Notably, a lot of people are trying to use circular arrays of ultrasound sensors to do FWI, particularly in the brain or the breast. But, it's a challenging inverse problem to solve and as far as I know, it's still extremely slow - nowhere near realtime.

The data they show is almost certainly a normal beamforming algorithm like delay and sum, possibly with some simple speed of sound correction. The most similar paper I know of is here in Nature Biomedical Engineering from a team at Caltech. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4

Re: Midjourney Medical

#897
post #520

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As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.

For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip. Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passi…

I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.

The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.

My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah sure. That's not going to be a sustainable model. Once the tech is available and money is to be made, lots of for-profit alternatives will appear with marketing and lobby budgets that will take over the market. Remember Open AI was a non-profit at some point. Look at how that turned out.

I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.

Exactly. With "you" in the original post I didn't mean the exact actor right now but whoever will be in charge eventually. When good actors leave the stage, you are only left with the bad ones.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#899
post #851

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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, suc…

Exactly my concern too. There are techniques like synthetic aperture focusing which can correct some of these errors to some degree but they're complex and have harsh limits of their own. It's always better to not have the errors introduced by the distance and water volume in the first place. The thing which makes no sense about this entire approach is we already can not have those errors. I've been looking up releva…

Right, this is where I'm at, in trying to 'strong-man' it. CT is great as a source and a detector, but when you add multiple detectors and can use scattering to your advantage, we're able to lower rad dosage for comparable images. So, yeah, what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better than we thought.

That's the only way this thing adds up in my head.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That “invisible persistent influence on your current state” are your metabolic processes.
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