621–630 of 927 posts
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…
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…
People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!
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…
> > labeled with diagnoses
I know you’re not suggesting this is easy, but I can absolutely promise that the land of medical reporting, diagnosis and imagery is about a 1000x more complicated and unhinged than you might expect.
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You should read til the end! No cabal, just stupidity and believing other people are stupid instead of telling them the truth and expecting them to act smart based on the information. Ask yourself, do you think billionnaires have yearly MRIs or that they wait for later because the doctor and themselves will be anxious? It's an argument that treats regular people as stupid.
First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability. If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable. Also, it’s quite like…
> 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…
Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.
Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
> 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…
Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
> 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…
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The website is calling for their full-body MRI-replacing ultrasonic scanners to be so cheap they're part of a spa session. TBH, this is already a red flag for me, like so many other "tech bro invents X" stories, though I am also aware of stories were "company realises Y is overpriced in medical purchases, makes Y cheaper, finds all hospitals think it is a scam and refuse to buy unless they raise prices".
Conventional ultrasound scanners are already cheap. Why can't a big ultrasound scanner be cheap too? What makes MRI machines expensive is that they are big helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have to be continuously kept at a few Kelvin.
But even if you disregard that, there's this:
It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.
The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.
You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done.
Note this does not mean I think the hardware proposed here is totally impossible*. Sure you could make an ultrasound scanner. Why not? But then, hyperloop was always physically possible, just never turned out to be a good idea to actually build**.
* That said, I am suspicious about the claim in the video "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom - not micrometers or nanometers but picometers!", which does sound impossible to me given the movement of atoms is the sense field itself, albeit I'm not an expert in this domain and may just be wrong like how there's weird tricks for photolithography smaller than the wavelength of light used.
** Back when hyperloop was taken seriously and I was still looking for genius behind things Musk said, I thought hyperloop was an excuse to develop here on Earth a transport system that for a Mars colony made more sense than cars and roads (and indeed I still think that, just there's no evidence Musk ever did).
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I'm grateful that modern science can monitor and predict such issues, even if in the end there's no problem. The alternative, as we know for thousands of years without modern health care, is far worse for women giving birth. I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too…
Sure, but in this case, there was a good reason for the additional tests: a high-risk pregnancy. And still, the outcome was stress for nothing. Now, imagine thousands of perfectly healthy people doing full-body scans every week just because they can. This actually carries the risk of jamming real health care, because those perfectly healthy people will undergo additional clinical tests for nothing.