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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

611–620 of 927 posts

Re: Midjourney Medical

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this from watching House. I am certain that it's true, but I also kind of wonder how much backpressure there is against this kind of thing because the scanners are also insanely expensive to run per minute.

This backpressure is even with cheaper devices such as x-rays etc.

The backpressure on x-rays is because dosing yourself with radiation on a regular basis is a really great way to generate health problems in the course of trying to find some. There's a reason x-ray operators and anyone in the room with the patient get given lead lined aprons to wear while the machine is active.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#612
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.

> Over treatment can be a real problem.

Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#613
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…

Another reason is that we don't actually know what negative effects regular "scans" might have.

Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#614
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…

I thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that.

https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-...

> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#615
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…

"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook. Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrowe…

I understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#616

Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school. Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator , if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infi…

In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy.

It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#617

Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school. Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator , if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infi…

If something like this became commonplace (and accurate enough), then it could be fantastic for research: enabling us to map out what variations are common and which aren't in a way that hasn't previously been feasible.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#618
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.

Because a lot of things showing up in scans you wont know what is until you cut them out or do a biopsy. And even then you might never know if that thing would have progressed to become a problem. Scanning more will not solve that.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#619
HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#620

> 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 hea…

After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image.

"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.

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