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Midjourney Medical

midjourney.com

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Re: Midjourney Medical

#861

Post by haldujai »

smith7018 wrote: post #845
ChrisRR wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a medical doctor at all, just an engineer who works in medical devices and I'm definitely sceptical about this. I'm not totally sure of the value of an imaging system that only gives you very low resolution images if they're not accurate enough to determine anything from. You'd need a secondary CT or MRI anyway so why not skip to that? My real concern is the dependence on external servers to reconstruct the i…

"why not skip to that?" MRIs and CT scans are expensive, require referrals, and you usually can't get them without believing you already have an issue. If this technology can get to a point where it's high enough resolution, cheap enough to just have at spas, and shared across the world then people will be able to know if/when they should get that secondary scan before symptoms start.

Probably cheaper and substantially better contrast resolution to use low field strength perma magnet MRIs with advanced computation to be honest.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#862

Post by JackFr »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #785
JackFr wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a weirdo who vaguely enjoys my MRIs. I’m moderately claustrophobic, but they still don’t really bother me. And I love the warming feeling that makes me feel like I’m getting microwaved.

What warming feeling? An MRI shouldn't really make you feel warm unless they're pushing IV contrast.

My understanding was that your body was absorbing some amount of whatever electromagnetic stuff passes through you for the image. And the techs have told me it’s nothing to worry about.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#863

Post by Cort3z »

If this all works, and becomes widely available, I wonder if people would get a lot of health anxiety. Now they can see stuff that is normal, but strange or unexpected.

I’m no doctor by any means, but what if, as an example, an organ fluctuates in size, or composition, naturally. A medical professional would know these things, but a random person off the street might get stressed out and start to panic, or perhaps overcompensate with their diet or something.

I think more data is generally good, but data without context or insight can be problematic.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#864

Post by Kotlopou »

pleurotus wrote: post #377
Jabrov wrote: post #133

They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd. Is this some AI hallucination post?

I've been sitting here trying to do sleepy morning train commute maths. 1billion scans per month, 50,000 scanners worldwide (!). 1 minute scan time. Lowers platform at 5cm/cm. FTA. Globally, apparently in 2023 there were 250,000 spas worldwide. [0] Their numbers would suggest these 1 billion people, getting scanned by 50k scanners, have each scanner doing 20k scans a month. 31 days, 24 hours, we have 744 hours in whi…

I don't think this changes anything important, but my understanding is that the lowering is the scan -- you go through the ring, which captures data about the slice currently inside it. That gets you down to ~80s, which rounds to a minute (they say "about 5 cm/s").

Now, there's a lot of other reasons to be skeptical (e.g. there's no information on what all of this imaging could actually resolve), but please don't shoot the message.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#865

Post by mrandish »

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…

It's true that sometimes deeply experienced professionals are less likely to discover or accept novel methods based on new approaches or technologies. Unfortunately, in this case MJ's proposed product is being deceptively presented to appear as if it's the kind of bold new approach we all hope to see in medicine - but it's not. It's a repackaging of an existing product that's already on the market.

MJ is buying the transducer chips used in Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device (it's not an R&D license, they're literally buying the same chip). The repackaging is to turn it into a contactless, 360 degree-at-once, 60 second full body scanner. Every aspect of the repackaging provides the same singular benefit over the Butterfly device: convenience. Unfortunately, every aspect of the repackaging has the same two downsides: lower resolution (meaning lower diagnostic value) and higher cost.

Spoiler alert: moving the imaging transducers 200-400 times farther away from your organs and introducing a large volume of water between the transducer and your skin in no way improves resolution or diagnostic value (quite the opposite (exponentially!)). Having 40 transducers on a hula hoop ring that far away offers no value over having one transducer much closer and moving to as many angles as necessary to image the volume of interest - except it might be a few minutes faster.

So, this isn't an "exciting new approach to medical imaging." It's a marketing repackage of an existing medical product into a non-medical, higher-cost, 'spa experience' with trendy, tech-adjacent appeal and vaguely medical-ish window dressing (it's carefully disclaimed has having no medical value in this form). Since the exact same chip is already available in a much less expensive, far more ideal form that's fully repositionable to any angle, is closer (and can deform skin to get closer still), the real question is how much medically-relevant diagnostic value could MJ's repackage of the same chip offer over the existing better, cheaper implementation? Butterfly's version is already FDA approved with proven diagnostic value. And all of MJ's hype around 'AI-powered' isn't about improving diagnostics, it's only necessary to recover at least some signal from the hurricane of noise and multi-path issues created by the adding MJ's cool-looking convenience features. But slowly being lowered into that tank with the neat ambient light ring sure looks sci-fi, right?

Re: Midjourney Medical

#866

Post by s1artibartfast »

randusername wrote: post #632

> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities. This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop. You have to hire an a…

It sounds like they are trying to fly under the FDA thresholds for regulation as a medical device and be considered a low risk "wellness device" which makes no medical diagnostic claims and has low risk. This is why it is in spas and not doctor's offices.

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

> FDA may consider certain products that use non-invasive sensing (e.g. optical sensing) to estimate, infer, or output physiologic parameters (e.g. blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood glucose, heart rate variability) to be general wellness products when such outputs are intended solely for wellness uses, and provided they:

• are non-invasive and not-implanted;

• do not involve an intervention or technology that may pose a risk to the safety of users or other persons if specific regulatory controls are not applied;

• are not intended for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, prevention, or treatment of a disease or condition;

• are not intended to substitute for an FDA-authorized, cleared, or approved device;

• do not include claims, functionality, or outputs that prompt or guide specific clinical action or medical management; and

• do not include values that mimic those used clinically unless validated (e.g. manufacturer testing, peer-reviewed clinical literature) to reflect those values

Re: Midjourney Medical

#868

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #729
conroydave wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why i always come to hacker news for the expert opinions. thank you for being critical yet optimistic.

You don't know if the opinion is expert. You don't know who that person is or what credentials they even have. Blindly trusting something that sounds right is a terrible way to inform yourself.

We don't know if any of the opinions on HN are expert for that matter. Yet somehow, it's survived and grown for 20 years.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#869

Post by s1artibartfast »

apaprocki wrote: post #495
intoXbox wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MRI physicist here as well. I have a basic understanding of ultrasound, and this looks like an array of transducers organized to perform tomography, just as CT did for Xray. However Ultrasound quality depends highly on transducer-skin contact. Any physicists here to comment on the effects of sonar through liquid and the effects on image resolution and field of view?

This paper, “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography”, goes into more detail. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

Notably, the lead author on that paper was a visiting researcher at midjourney last year.

Re: Midjourney Medical

#870

Post by ErroneousBosh »

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…

> "Incidentalomas"

Good word for it. We were a bit worried about something that showed up my my mum's scans, as if an inoperable tangerine-sized lung tumour wasn't a big enough problem. It was a round dot about the size of a pea on her adrenal gland that lit up like crazy in contrast dye. Now, that as you probably know was a worry because oh shit, lymphatic system involvement, that's going to spread like crazy.

But after two years of immunotherapy, and about six years after being detected while the lung cancer is gone, the pea is still there, still as bright as ever, neither getting bigger nor smaller.

No-one is in a hurry to poke at it and see what it is, just in case that turns out to be a mistake.

89 this year and at least got to see her grandchildren start primary school, so good work from your lot and the oncologists!

Now I know it's an "incidentaloma" :-)

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