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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#321

Post by haldujai »

This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.

It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.

More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.

Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.

This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#322

Post by arcticbull »

ricardobayes wrote: post #318
krzat wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless. I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.

They kind of are. Spain doesn't have yearly physicals, and during a GP visit, they don't even take your blood pressure. Blood tests are extremely uncommon, unlike in British medicine, where they take your blood pressure every time and blood tests are so prevalent people usually request one from time to time despite having no symptoms. Spain's example showed the above (or the lack of) doesn't increase all-cause mortal…

Several published papers agree. There is in fact little evidence to support regular checkups if you’re asymptomatic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/

I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#324

Post by Forgeties79 »

adastra22 wrote: post #259
kilbuz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

false positives are a real problem

Only if you let them. The false positive thing is a nonissue that only arises from assuming you would respond to information a certain way.

I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode about the negative impact of full, generalized body scans on a patient's wellbeing decades ago.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#325

Post by thih9 »

> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.

Why don’t they approach this as a regular medical product?

With this spa angle I’m worried about hidden motives; perhaps data collection is a major goal. Or maybe this tech is not reliable enough.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#326

Post by friendzis »

sroussey wrote: post #305
convnet wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues…

If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are. But we would have great data over time, both individually (weird tends to only matter if they are changing) and as a population.

> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.

That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#327

Post by ElFitz »

autoexec wrote: post #270
kibibu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.

It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place ( https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry... ). The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midj…

> The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output.

And the safety of the data as well. Am I supposed to entrust full body scans to a startup?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#328

Post by inasio »

I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#330

Post by atq2119 »

ccheney wrote: post #32
noobermin wrote: post #22

Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.

Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?

That was probably not GP's point, but they can be. Sound-based weapons are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.

I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.

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