Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#41

Post by moralestapia » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:21 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #15

pcrh wrote: post #3

There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that. [0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

I have a similar feeling. One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives. Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art. my worry is two fold: 1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have inva…

>Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult

Can't wait to read your papers and/or watch your videos where you show us :).

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#42

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #38

roer wrote: post #24

This skepticism is weird to me. I might be overly naive, but it looks like these are people that have funding for doing something they think is cool and think could help people out. Whether or not it turns out that way is something we'll have to see, but the premise of just going ahead and building the thing should be applauded in my opinion

I think the negativity is due to the vibes and framing of the "spa" for rich people to hang out and do some low-key "health optimization", it ties to Silicon Valley longevity stuff, pattern matches with the vibe of cryogenics and other quantified self stuff etc, instead of a vibe of making something that broadly improves the health of the masses and lower classes.

As a business case that looks great. Somewhere between genius and standard practice for most industries.

Start with low-volume runs targeted at upperclass customers who can afford the pricetag. Bonus points for a group that has a proven track record of spending unreasonable sums for unproven technology. Over time the user story, manufacturing, parts sourcing, regulatory approvals all get sorted out and you can move down into bigger and bigger markets and lower and lower price points

Of course that risks being associated with all the crap the same high-spenders spend their cash on

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#43

Post by iamleppert » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

roer wrote: post #24

This skepticism is weird to me. I might be overly naive, but it looks like these are people that have funding for doing something they think is cool and think could help people out. Whether or not it turns out that way is something we'll have to see, but the premise of just going ahead and building the thing should be applauded in my opinion

I wouldn't want to get into a medical scanner built by an AI image generation company! Marketed as a spa treatment. There are so many things that can go wrong and the unseriousness around the whole thing bothers me.

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#44

Post by sigmar » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

pcrh wrote: post #3

There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that. [0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

They don't make any specific claims about what conditions it will diagnose. At 16:30, he says they are only initially doing "body composition" because anything more would add 9+ months to the deployment timeline. I assume they mean they process the images to return an estimate of body fat/muscle mass. Which isn't difficult and it seems likely they could get the error bars pretty low just off estimating subq fat alone. He doesn't say the specific classification they received from the FDA, just that it is a class 2 medical device.

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#45

Post by gpm » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #43

roer wrote: post #24

This skepticism is weird to me. I might be overly naive, but it looks like these are people that have funding for doing something they think is cool and think could help people out. Whether or not it turns out that way is something we'll have to see, but the premise of just going ahead and building the thing should be applauded in my opinion

I wouldn't want to get into a medical scanner built by an AI image generation company! Marketed as a spa treatment. There are so many things that can go wrong and the unseriousness around the whole thing bothers me.

> There are so many things that can go wrong

Are there? My impression is that basically the only thing that can go wrong with ultrasound is they pump too much energy into you, and as risks go that seems both difficult to screw up and easy to make sure you don't screw up.

The imaging might be useless, but then that's why it's a spa treatment. I assume the primary use cases for this are (at least until it's developed a lot more seriously) "cute" non-medical baby images and body composition - the former of which can't really go wrong and the competition for the latter is a scale with some electrodes making shit up anyways.

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#46

Post by KaiserPro » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #41

KaiserPro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar feeling. One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives. Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art. my worry is two fold: 1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have inva…

>Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult Can't wait to read your papers and/or watch your videos where you show us :).

https://thepihut.com/products/ultrasonic-distance-unit-i-o-r...

as I said, an image is doable, there is opensource to do that: https://hackaday.io/project/159467-open-source-ultrasonic-ph...

accurate and repeatable is that hard bit.

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#47

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

sigmar wrote: post #44

pcrh wrote: post #3

There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that. [0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

They don't make any specific claims about what conditions it will diagnose. At 16:30, he says they are only initially doing "body composition" because anything more would add 9+ months to the deployment timeline. I assume they mean they process the images to return an estimate of body fat/muscle mass. Which isn't difficult and it seems likely they could get the error bars pretty low just off estimating subq fat alone…

Just reliably estimating body fat and muscle mass could already sell well with high-class fitness studios. Those already offer those scales with handheld probes as a feature, and those contraptions are horribly inaccurate. With this you not only get accurate estimates, you can also attribute them to your body parts.

"This month you gained 5% muscles mass in your upper arms, but lost 3% in your core muscles" "Body fat in your upper thighs reduced by 10%. You are on track to reach your goal in 6 months". It might be expensive, but there would be plenty of customers willing to pay for that

Then they can work on getting price down and accuracy up, both of which seem to be goals for the future

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#48

Post by DavidHolz » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

sparklingmango wrote: post #27

bparsons wrote: post #2

Does this whole thing seem fishy to anyone else?

Yes. We are right to be suspicious due to the main goal of start ups and corporations: profit for their shareholders. Theranos will always be in the back of my mind regarding healthcare technology start ups.

We have no investors! We're doing this with our own money because it seems like a good thing to do :)

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#49

Post by DavidHolz » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC

AyyEye wrote: post #10

bparsons wrote: post #2

Does this whole thing seem fishy to anyone else?

They hallucinate images for a living, of course making a medical imager is fishy (to put it extremely nicely).

There's no AI in anything right now, we're just using physics based classical algorithms. It makes sense to eventually use AI but in the context of like initializing a physics solver to reduce the step-count.

Re: Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

#50

Post by DavidHolz » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:03 AM UTC

Fraterkes wrote: post #11

One thing that’s kinda awkward in the video: they mention one of the big shortcomings of ultrasound being that it can’t image “airy” organs like the lungs, and their expert responds to that by mentioning that the amount of angles/devices means that you still get imaging of everything surrounding the lungs. But the critiscism isn’t that the lungs would obstruct you from imaging certain areas, it’s that there’s just ve…

Every imaging modality has pros and cons. Like CT imaging is bad at soft tissues but much better at bones than MRI. This physics has a lot of really cool and unique properties and imho it obviously makes sense for someone to invest in them. And we are (with our own money, no investors, etc). In my mind, in the future, you really want the best "megabytes per second per dollar" about your body. And it's hard to beat this by that measure. It's also very possible to keep adding more and more sensors to this system. I'd love to add some more that further improve the imaging inside the lungs and brain. We'll see how far we get but imho over the long run we'll be the fastest way to do a lot of things and it will help a lot of people.