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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

571–580 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#571
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#572
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 put lead in paint and gas because why the fuck not? Asbestos pretty much everywhere because it was a miracle material, etc. for decades, and we're still paying the price

Re: Midjourney Medical

#573
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

The sci-fi writes itself. Someone hacks the spa’s schedule to find out when you’re getting your scan done, then hacks the machine to push the output to 11 when you’re in, and liquifies your insides.

The first Midjourney Medical murder.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#574
post #560

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive. But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. Bu…

Agreed, If you look for issues, you'll find them.

Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).

In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).

Re: Midjourney Medical

#575
post #570
post #560

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive. But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. Bu…

Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature? I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.

I think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#576

> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people. There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain condition…

I love how people wait for some kind of technological God or magic silver bullet to """cure""" them, but when it comes to eating clean, exercising, not sitting 8 hours in front of a fucking screen every single day, getting good sleep, and all the other low hanging fruits you can act on right now, it's radio silence even though it would solves the majority of health issues

Re: Midjourney Medical

#577
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that both MRIs and ultrasounds do not introduce problems.

MRIs by themselves no, but depending on what you want to actually see you need to inject a contrast agent which is probably not something you want to do too frequently.

Good point, I was not thinking about MRIs with contrast.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#578

> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people. There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain condition…

This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_. For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is…

Consider the null space of diagnostic markers, say, the precise shape of a tissue boundary used in early cancer diagnoses that comes out blurry in an imaging system every time. More scans with the same null space will not resolve the null space.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#579
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit. Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of…

As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.

For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip.

Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passive, as in MR elastography (most common), where the patient wears a transducer pad, and vibration is actively generated by a driver. You've then got algorithmically-passive, which is more analogue to passive sonar, reconstructing tissue stiffness from ambient broadband vibration without the emitted probing pulse, but that is very much entirely academic. I guess the question would be, why is it worth pursuing when you have something like optical coherence elastography (OCE) for non-invasive profiling. Doing it using noisy ultrasound method becomes redundant. There are other methods, but the outcome is the same.

Generally (this is true for all systems, not just humans) you need to induce energy into it to more effectively measure it's output. Think of it like a bell - if I want to hear the note it produces, it's much easier to hear what this is if I ring it with a hammer. Granted, it will be "passively" resonating to a point where, with a sensitive enough sensor, I could probably pick up the output without the hammer - but that is a pointless problem to solve. I could hit a bell with a soft hammer a million times over without causing damage to it. The lifetime of the person hitting it with a hammer is far shorter than the accumulative damage to the bell before it breaks. The same is true for humans. You could effectively run a very low-energy, 60Hz vibration through a person (which is how the pads work) for multiple lifetimes before it would cause significant damage, so there comes little point in solving that problem. As such, true "passive" imaging is functionally pointless if your outcome is "safely image a patient". You're overengineering your solution to solve a problem that is only relevant if your patient was planning on living for 1000+ years.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#580

I have a mixed response: 1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it. 2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels - off , somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named…

quite the opposite. it feels refreshing that ppl with talent and money can do inspiring things with it.
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