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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#401

Post by poilcn »

wkoszek wrote: post #382
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…

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 cou…

Healthcare resources are very limited, you'd overwhelm it with lots of "yeah that's a defect, but 40% have it", things that would go away on its own, false positives, things that do not require urgent intervention, 10x increase of hypochondriacs and health deterioration caused by anxiety

You'd have a system where every resource is allocated for diagnostics, but no medical staff to treat it

Also a significant part of population avoids screening even if they are not required to paid anything from their pocket

Re: Midjourney Medical

#402

Post by theparanoid »

wkoszek wrote: post #382
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…

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 cou…

The targeted scans and tests that we already do offer surprising little benefit.

Mammogram screening based on randomized-trial all-cause mortality, has not shown a measurable reduction in total deaths.

Randomized colonoscopy screening has not shown a statistically significant all-cause mortality reduction.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#403

Post by dooglius »

cornstalks wrote: post #246
unholiness wrote: post #119

So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection). On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video ren…

> Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own Is it? Linear No Threshold has largely been rejected at this point. https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed....

Your link does not support, and in fact refutes, your claim

Re: Midjourney Medical

#404

Post by dsign »

It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.

The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.

At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.

Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#405

Post by ascorbic »

aipatselarom wrote: post #308
arcticbull wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, don’t do tests on asymptomatic low-risk people until you can demonstrate that a positive result has any meaning whatsoever.

Hypertension is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause stroke, heart attack, or organ damage through long-term vessel strain, by which time damage may be irreversible; detecting it on time can prevent this with lifestyle changes and medication. Diabetes is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause damage t…

The decision as to whether mass screening is justified or not is complex, and varies a lot by test/condition/population etc. Luckily there are lots of smart people whose job it is to do these caclulations.

In your list, 1-4 are common enough, the tests are accurate enough, the costs of intervention are low enough and the benefits of early intervention are high enough to justify screening, which is why they do generally screen for them at least in hgiher risk groups. The other two are more mixed, which is why mass screening is less common.

All the evidence for full body scans is that they are not justified for asymptomatic people. The false positives are high, the costs of these false positives are high, and the imporved outcomes are too low to justify them. If you want one, go ahead, but realise that almost anything it finds is likely to be false either positive or not likely to ever cause a problem, and you'd have to deal with the worry and invasive tests and even surgery in aid of something that may never cause any trouble.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#408

Post by Kristencline »

ER Nurse here:

This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.

The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.

So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.

These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.

Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.

I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.

What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...

Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.

I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve

Re: Midjourney Medical

#409

Post by rlt »

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…

> every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan

Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?

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