Midjourney Medical • Hacker News Board

Re: Midjourney Medical

#761

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #273

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…

Don’t make me tap the sign. Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is. When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep. Unless this is…

We could test symptomatic people.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#762

Post by jmhmd » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #748

jmhmd wrote: post #683

Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist: - This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo. - They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve a…

Not a physician. Some observations on these statements. The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have." The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?" Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to…

Your points are well taken, and I think this is the fundamental struggle of anyone who works in a narrow and deep field. It's truly difficult to see things from a different point of view sometimes. It certainly could turn out that this ultrasound setup gives truly new information, but, it isn't really a new way of generating an image, it's the same physics we've used to generate images from sound waves for decades, and that modality comes with some pretty hard physical limitations that this demo does not directly address. Time will tell, if they don't run out of money. I'm hopeful!

Re: Midjourney Medical

#763

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

zurfer wrote: post #424

arcticbull wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t make me tap the sign. Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is. When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep. Unless this is…

I heard the same argument from my doctor when I wanted a blood scan. But what's the intention? If you do a scan and then try to find everything that is wrong about you, you're 100% right, there will be false positives and unnecessary panic/medication etc. However if you just collect data for months and years and WHEN you get a symptom you have a lot more data then we should be able to give better diagnosis faster. If…

I think it's (at least partly) about the psychological impact of finding something unusual. Even if you know that it's probably nothing and understand the Bayes theorem, there will be a "what if" that might be strong enough to do actual harm (nocebo effect).

Compare: The placebo effect works (at a reduced rate) even if you tell people they're getting a placebo!

Re: Midjourney Medical

#764

Post by aerodexis » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #742

jmye wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd. Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd. It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were. > Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context? I think the…

> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it

So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.

I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:

1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers

1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.

All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.

The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#765

Post by jmhmd » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #757

jmhmd wrote: post #683

Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist: - This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo. - They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve a…

They spent a lot of time selling the spa, and not a lot of time showing us the data.

That's because there isn't any data yet, at least not enough from real patients to be meaningful. I would love to see some of the raw imaging data they have generated though, if that's what you mean.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#766

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #487

jibal wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense at all, unless you're saying that people should respond to all such information by ignoring it.

You could repeat the test, perhaps on a more frequent interval to keep an eye on it. You could follow up with a more specific test, or do confirming blood work. In the meantime you can adjust your diet as a precaution, or get motivated to get in shape just in case. There's plenty of room between "go under the knife" and "ignore altogether."

Or only consider it a positive once the confidence is high enough that false positives are not a problem anymore.

Getting a test good enough to still make it useful (detect enough of the true positives) would of course be a challenge, but the more data is available, the more feasible that might be.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#767

Post by omnivore » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

jmhmd wrote: post #683

Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist: - This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo. - They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve a…

I'm far more willing to trust someone in the field every day (you), over keyboard warriors who want to validate their new toy is alive.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#768

Post by jmhmd » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #755

arcticfox wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayes Theorem...the chances this rather milquetoast and balanced analysis was written by someone with no knowledge is vanishingly low IMO.

With LLM tools being widely available, it's extremely high, imo.

Hah, I'm neither a bot nor written with any help from an LLM, but I'll take the fact that you can't tell the difference as a compliment :)

Re: Midjourney Medical

#769

Post by pigpop » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #750

cseleborg wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside. Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not…

We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit. You figure out this stuff by gathe…

Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc.

The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#770

Post by dwa3592 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

> 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.

Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.