It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.
I think the more interesting angle is focused ultrasound which is proposed as a solution to a whole lot of diseases
Ultrasound imaging of the brain
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Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#22How about just getting it more established in orthopedic practices so patients aren't required to 1. See ortho for MRI referral 2. schedule mri at imaging facility 3. PAY $750 - $3000 for an MRI 4. Wait to get back into ortho. I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?
Why in the heck was this comment downvoted? Because that was exactly my thought reading the article: the mind machine interface stuff is weird (and fMRI blood flow is never going to achieve a lot it is a blunt tool which this is related to).
But high resolution imaging of blood flow? That's a pretty great medical diagnostic tool if you can make it more available and cheaper.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#23It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
The damage done by Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos goes way further than just that company. There is a lot of distrust now in anything tech that touches on medical devices. Some of it is for good measure, some of it will prevent really cool stuff from happening.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#24How about just getting it more established in orthopedic practices so patients aren't required to 1. See ortho for MRI referral 2. schedule mri at imaging facility 3. PAY $750 - $3000 for an MRI 4. Wait to get back into ortho. I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?
Why in the heck was this comment downvoted? Because that was exactly my thought reading the article: the mind machine interface stuff is weird (and fMRI blood flow is never going to achieve a lot it is a blunt tool which this is related to). But high resolution imaging of blood flow? That's a pretty great medical diagnostic tool if you can make it more available and cheaper.
Additionally, as an ambulance chaser who looks at medical bills all day, people don't realize how much of the zombie medical debt out there is from scummy ERs (HCA etc) doing 2 or 3 pointless MRIs at $5k a pop.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#25re: imaging red blood cells The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensin…
Showing us a technique that is entirely reliant on sparseness and then saying they hope to employ it on something that isn’t sparse at all (blood cells) does feel misleading. I’m filing this in the category of technologies I wish could be true, but for which no plausible path to overcoming the obvious limitations has been provided.
From the bubble center plot, I'm guessing that the bubbles are separated on average about a few mm apart? Taking the other comment's guess at face value, you're going from about 2 mm to 20 um, so 2 orders of magnitude. Air (technically SF6 in the article) and water (RBC is close enough) have acoustic impedances that differ by 3.5 orders of magnitude.
My assumptions here are *extremely generous*, i.e. favorable to the "oh, we'll just make it work with natural contrast", and even then, they can't hand wave 5-6 orders of magnitude of improvement. Furthermore, because of the use of super resolution, I'm guessing there's some exponential factor in there, i.e. double the density of bubbles/tracking points past some critical limit, then you need 8x the data to reconstruct things.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
The Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull. They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles. The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into ever…
This scanner doesn't inject bubble contrast either. A nurse does it. Obviously a nurse could do that when you use the Midjourney scanner too...
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#27Is this the same tech the Midjourney scanner device is using?
Yeah, they’re using butterfly network chips for the ultrasound but with some additions.
(IV with microbubbles that they can trace as it flows through the brain & some extra imaging algorithms)
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
The damage done by Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos goes way further than just that company. There is a lot of distrust now in anything tech that touches on medical devices. Some of it is for good measure, some of it will prevent really cool stuff from happening.
Exactly. The concept itself; a machine that can do a bunch of tests from a whole lot less blood would be amazing but anyone who wants to do this now is automatically "oh so like Theranos" and then not gonna give you money to do this PhD or post doc and do you figure out a way to do this? You can't raise money because everyone's gonna be thinking of Theranos.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#29Every few years one of these ultrasound companies comes around and promising to revolutionize medical imaging and nothing ever comes of it. Anyone remember https://www.openwater.health? The same ideas are in a perpetual state of being reinvented and part of me thinks its just a hustle for the MIT Media Lab/Stanford Imaging grads to give them something to do.
The tell is "super resolution", "brain computer interface" and "mixed modality" -- adding some contrast agent here, or maybe an IR light source.
It turns out the nyquist limit, diffraction and physics are real things.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#30re: imaging red blood cells The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensin…
I believe this is also used for regular astronomy with dithering