Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#391

Post by rdl »

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.

If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.

Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.

(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)

Re: Midjourney Medical

#392

Post by nirui »

I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough.

Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth.

But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#393

Post by wkoszek »

teekert wrote: post #381

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 pla…

If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#394

Post by user43928 »

jibal wrote: post #316
sroussey wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.

Are people really going to perform invasive procedures over mere concern if there are no symptoms and the doctor recommends against it?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#395

Post by schmorptron »

Jtsummers wrote: post #190
danpalmer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable. Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8…

Yep, and with full body submersion, they'll need to change out that water regularly. And people think data centers waste water, Midjourney says, "Hold my beer."

you can build the datacenter right next to the tank and use the now-warm cooling water to pump into the tanks!

Re: Midjourney Medical

#396

Post by rdl »

reverius42 wrote: post #369
mNovak wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already ultrasound babies in the womb, so one would hope this has been studied.

Before ultrasound, they used to x-ray pregnant women to see the fetus. At that time, someone might have said "one would hope this has been studied"... unfortunately that practice went on for about 60 years before being stopped in the late 1950s. Side note: kinda crazy they had medical x-rays in the 1890s. X-Ray imaging was discovered in 1985 and used clinically within 2 years. But I do agree with your point, these da…

We also used to x-ray people for shoe fitting/for lulz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

Re: Midjourney Medical

#397

Post by rasmus1610 »

rdl wrote: post #391

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical. If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice…

It will be terrible for brain imaging. The ultrasound waves can’t go through the skull and thus can’t image the brain. Additionally you would have to drown the patient since you need a medium other than air between the ultrasound emitting probe and the body which is water in their device.

CT is more than sufficient for imaging the brain in a case of trauma and MRI is not automatically better than CT in every case.

(I am a neuroradiologist)

Re: Midjourney Medical

#398

Post by khutorni »

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…

> walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab

Maybe take it out to dinner first?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#399

Post by schmorptron »

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains.

Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)

Re: Midjourney Medical

#400

Post by icantevenhold »

user43928 wrote: post #394
jibal wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.

Are people really going to perform invasive procedures over mere concern if there are no symptoms and the doctor recommends against it?

People take horse dewormer against COVID so yes they will do all kinds of irrational things
Post reply on HN