191–200 of 236 posts
There is no mentioning of exposure during MRIs. Is there none? I would have thought, CTs as well as MRIs are a problem because of exposure.
Because CT scans and MRI scans are very different technologies.... CT = xray MRI = Magnetic resonance imaging There is no exposure in an MRI to radiation. The only danger would be having bits of metal on you or inside you.
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”Determining whether something is (non) malignant isn't trivial. It often requires a more invasive test (e.g., biopsy, exploratory surgery)” Not necessarily, waiting can in many cases tell you whether something is malignant. If we had, say, a century of monthly full-body MRIs of a million persons, together with their history and cause of death, the technology to align those scans across time, and the technology to an…
Two reasons I think this is not the way to go: First, the cost would be insane. A century of monthly MRIs is 1200 scans per person, or 1.2B scans to finish your hypothetical dataset. We pay about $US 550/hr for scanner time, using a research scanner that's subsidized (i.e., we're just covering costs, not making a profit). The article doesn't say how long the scan is. You can burn as much scanner time as you want chas…
“Because it’s too expensive,” seems like a great opportunity for some clever startup to figure out a way to make it less expensive. Computers used to take up entire rooms. Flying across the country used to be insanely expensive. Cell phones used to cost a ton of money per minute. Reducing the cost of scanning, or developing entirely new scanning tech isn’t science fiction, it’s the future.
Many doctors hate full body scans. Every individual has a handful of anomalies which are almost always benign. They show up on full body scans and chasing them down comes with cost and patient risk. I have a hard time with reporting like this that doesn't quantify cost of biopsy on false-positives as well as cost of complications from examining false-positives. Source: worked in clinical research for 2 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
”Determining whether something is (non) malignant isn't trivial. It often requires a more invasive test (e.g., biopsy, exploratory surgery)” Not necessarily, waiting can in many cases tell you whether something is malignant. If we had, say, a century of monthly full-body MRIs of a million persons, together with their history and cause of death, the technology to align those scans across time, and the technology to an…
Two reasons I think this is not the way to go: First, the cost would be insane. A century of monthly MRIs is 1200 scans per person, or 1.2B scans to finish your hypothetical dataset. We pay about $US 550/hr for scanner time, using a research scanner that's subsidized (i.e., we're just covering costs, not making a profit). The article doesn't say how long the scan is. You can burn as much scanner time as you want chas…
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A decent portion of my family are MDs. This is accurate. However, this is also one of the places where it's quite disappointing to see human squishiness in action. When we opt to not receive data because we know there'll likely be non-malignant anomalies, we are also depriving ourselves of the raw data that allows us to discern non-malignant from malignant, data which would help very much in deciding on the cases we…
I am actually an MD. > Had we enforced a full-body MRI for every patient, we would quickly amass enough imaging data to know which anomalies are malignant and which are not to a very high degree How, pray tell, are we actually determining which are malignant and which are not?? I’ll give you a hint: the charitable explanation is you are completely ignorant, the less charitable one is that you consider Mengele and Ish…
A biopsy? Whichever method you would normally use to find this out?
You could even ignore all the information and just train your algorithm on whether the patient died in the next 5 years (after the scan/s).
Obviously you need data before you can determine anything automatically. But I don’t think everyone would be averse to this even if you do tell them it might be more likely to kill them due to excessive testing.
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> watching them over time In my mind this is the key... a way to frequently and conveniently do a full body scan so that anomalies can be detected via the delta. Scanning and detection is a problem that likely could be tackled via machine learning. I'm hoping it's not too long before a method is developed where a low res MRI like scan is feasible at home (e.g. using radio or ultrasound). Done on a regular basis the s…
Obtaining the delta from two different images is actually non trivial. And contrary to what HN thinks, not every problem is trivially solved by machine learning. Small point aside: an ultrasound scan -- even if it was every feasible at home -- would not be an MRI. MRI means you use the spin echo and relaxation of nucleii (mostly protons for medical MRI). It is not a generic word for "please give me a 3d image". Words…
Still not something you’d have in your home, but not nearly 10M dollars. Maybe you can have one in your community medical center?
Many doctors hate full body scans. Every individual has a handful of anomalies which are almost always benign. They show up on full body scans and chasing them down comes with cost and patient risk. I have a hard time with reporting like this that doesn't quantify cost of biopsy on false-positives as well as cost of complications from examining false-positives. Source: worked in clinical research for 2 years.
Ignorance is bliss until you miss that easily removed tumor... etc and you are stage 3 going for chemo, or a brain anurism...
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> watching them over time In my mind this is the key... a way to frequently and conveniently do a full body scan so that anomalies can be detected via the delta. Scanning and detection is a problem that likely could be tackled via machine learning. I'm hoping it's not too long before a method is developed where a low res MRI like scan is feasible at home (e.g. using radio or ultrasound). Done on a regular basis the s…
There is a point at which the radiation you're receiving from regular scans becomes harmful enough to outweigh the benefits of early detection.
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What I mean is, just because the person is "actually an MD" doesn't mean the person has expertise in this specific area yet the person is using it to claim such. I.E. some might call me a computer scientist, but that doesn't mean I have enough expertise in machine learning, a sub-discipline, to say definitively that the OP's idea about using full body scan data is feasible. Should I have started my post "I am actuall…
It’s not a big deal. I only mentioned as a response because the op started off saying they were from a family of MDs. Also the vast majority of practicing physicians are expected to have detailed expertise to understand the indications, application, and interpretation of imaging within their speciality. Most imaging orders are issued by medical or surgical staff, not radiologists.
Looking through your post history you often jump to "appeal to authority" combined with name calling and it's a pattern that reeks of arrogance to me.
For example one of your posts starts out along the lines of, I'm not a 747 pilot, but I am a pilot... in a post about something specific to the 747 and you say the other guy was "talking out their ass." Again, not super relevant appeal to authority and some mean-spirited name calling.
> Not a 747 pilot (not sure why that matters here)... but a pilot. The flight positions are equal. The plane is designed to be flown the same from either flight position and this is routinely done. The guy saying otherwise is talking out their ass.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19675391
Another of your posts both claims you were trained as engineer and manages to call someone "full of crap" in the first two sentences.
> I personally think the gp is full of crap. I’m trained as an engineer and worked in industry a few years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674031
You just seem to love to tell everyone you're super special and smarter than them because of your accomplishments as a means of arguing and then put them down. It gives you instant validity to some of course, but I think it's just lazy. Your arguments should stand on their own merit. Not request to authority or anecdotes from your kind-of-related experience.