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Midjourney Medical

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#381

Post by teekert »

A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.

So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."

But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...

Re: Midjourney Medical

#382

Post by wkoszek »

convnet wrote: post #287
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #233

I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors). With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including…

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…

All doctors say this, and that sort of drove me away from healthtech. As if there were absolutely no way to take a step in a direction of fixing it.

The faster and earlier we start to scan everyone regularly, as long as scanning methods aren't invasive, the more certainty we'll have what to warn people about and what not to tell them. Perhaps with the regular screening (imaging quarterly, if the scan is fast) you could see what is growing and what isn't.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#386

Post by wkoszek »

aquafox wrote: post #266
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #233

I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors). With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including…

The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.

The idea here is to make scans very common and regular, hopefully from early age of the patient. It could be like a blood pressure measurement at CVS.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#388

Post by aswegs8 »

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.

Without clear hypotheses you will have a lot of false positives. Which are quite costly in healthcare.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#389

Post by teiferer »

moozilla wrote: post #358
teiferer wrote: post #335

> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health. With "you" being a VC backed startup aiming for the next $1T IPO. What could possibly go wrong?

Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article: > As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.

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.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#390

Post by wkoszek »

friendzis wrote: post #336
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #233

I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors). With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including…

There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations. This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.

Other tests should be solved too (fecal/urine/blood). Perhaps we need more R&D in here to accelerate progress.

We already have patients trying to track their own health over longer time which is great. We then just have to make AI good enough to spot warning signs (without patients asking). Or parhaps we need to make those tests easy and cheap and regular.

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