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- Hacker News
- A collection of opinions on this in a radiology dedicated publication, which seems much more productive than engagement slop:
https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h...
- Midjourney seems useless these days, not even sure why would anyone use.by democracy
- MidJourney has better style than most other image generators, especially for artistic images.
Unfortunately it hasn't kept up on image quality, detail, or text rendering. I think this is because they don't have the $ to keep up in the scaling game.
by Legend2440 - I'm not a doctor but (Isn't there always a but after someone saying they aren't a doctor?) it seems to me we need three things to bring in a true revolution:
- imaging that can get down to the cellular level easily and often.
- the ability to process that imaging data to find issues effectively.
- the ability to act on that data in a minimally invasive way.
This is a step in the right direction for one and two and the third has had progress too by others. We aren't there yet, but I can see a future where individual cells are treated and at that point all sorts of things are possible.
by jmward01 - The problem is there's an inverse relationship between penetration of the sound waves and the frequency.by colingauvin
- one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat
by jti107 - This is AI right?by winrid
- Everything long form on Twitter these days is.by adastra22
- > But the only way to find out was to have invasive, risky procedures to biopsy or remove what was found.
> And overall, the side effects from all the risky, invasive procedures to track down the over 90% of stuff that was harmless equal or outweigh the benefit from removing the less than 10% of stuff that wasn't harmless.
I accept this (well-used) perspective from a practical, current perspective, but not for abstract diagnostics generally. From the Bayes' theorem, and same logic you use in Kalman filters: More knowledge, if you have data on the confidence, always helps. It only causes these negative outcomes due to acting poorly with the data (e.g. due to emotions and liability concerns, I suspect here)
- The most practical Bayesian counter (indep of matters of confidence) might be the info bottleneck:
The risk (bottleneck) is in throwing out the relevant detailsto generalize accurately, one must forget (irrelevant) details - Tech folks have a very ... unique ... perspective on things. The following conversation would not be unusual for a tech geek--"Oh, they found something on that scan, so I need to get it looked at once a week for a month or two. Okay. Shrug.*
That is NOT a typical patient response. Go run that in front of any doctors and watch them laugh you out of the room.
1) When most people see something medical flagged, their first reaction is PANIC.
My friend's wife had something flag on her mammogram--the biopsy later showed it to be benign. In the meantime, her anxiety drove her blood pressure to something like 175 over 130 and they had to up her anxiety and blood pressure meds until the biopsy came back. Her probability of stroke was way higher than her probability of breast cancer. My grandfather had a little blood in his urine from a slowly growing bladder cancer. He forced them to treat it in spite of the fact that he was in his mid-80s, and the probability that cancer would kill him was zero. Instead, he basically died feeling miserable from the cancer treatments 6 months later.
2) Most working people cannot take off the amount of time necessary to do a weekly set of followup medical appointments for a couple months. Again, this is very different from tech geeks who can pretty much throw their work schedules around pretty flexibly.
by bsder - For those not following the debate of X, there have been a surge of doctors who are saying that full body scans are net negative.
The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad including risky biopsies. Some have gone so far as to literally state early detection does not lead to better outcomes (simply not true - genuine early detection is very helpful but what they mean is it is outweighed at the population level by false positives).
The counter argument is that more information is always good but that you must learn to handle the noise, and we should focus on improving how we handle false positives. Including, but not limited to more frequent and abundant scans of various types.
The reason this is trending is because it both includes the argument and feels nice that someone changes their mind.
Personally, I think a lot of the issues here come down to the fact that we lie about the statistics instead of just show them. A test is neither positive or negative. It’s x% updated probability that you have something.
by mchusma - >The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad
Maybe we need better treatment of the results rather than less scans?
by tim333 - There’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.
In general, I think we should applaud this though.
Any genuine attempt to create novel medical technologies is probably a good thing (assuming they’re non-invasive and non-painful).
Unless it’s a Theranos situation, I think it’s a great thing to attempt, even if it fails. So many things we rely on today are the result of a successful attempt, but the failures were just as necessary for the eventual success.
That ambition is very positive to me.
by FinnLobsien - It's a Theranos situation.
>>That ambition is very positive to me.
...and this is why people fall for it. Every. Single. Time.
Literally everything they're saying is marketingslop gobbledegook. No studies, no papers, no doctors; just "500k transducers," and "30fps!" Anyone can wire that up. With a little cash, you might even be able to stream, record, and proccess it. Still means absolute diddly squat if you haven't compared it to other imaging or figured out how to train a radiologist to use it effectively or done trials for specific diagnostics or diseases.
They'll figure out if it does anything other than show you an animated cartoon xray of yourself later. After they have your money.
by bradgranath - I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutionsby vinyl7
- 2 things:
1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.
2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.
- >Rather, helpful tests become convenient
Buried in tlb's response might be the J-curve, the S-Curve (=integral of J-Curve), the hype curve, and finally Braess/Jevon/Baumol: why is healthcare inflationary if it is so helpful and so needed. The tension between helpfulness and perceived necessity must be explored, ceterum censeo (3.)
- I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."
The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.
It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.
And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."
by madrox - Even damn X-Rays cost more than $100.
Something like this will never cost patients $100. Even if the actual cost to a provider was $5, patients would be billed $500 after insurance…
by BobbyTables2 - >The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.
yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.
when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.
by notatoad - Interesting that this Tweet is trending on HN, because it’s rather empty of actual details.
There have been a lot of more thoughtful analyses of the scanner circulating on Twitter that have actually highlighted the real problems with what they’re claiming.
An example of an important point brought up by someone with actual domain expertise is to point out that ultrasound doesn’t travel well through bone or air. Once you realize this, you understand why they chose the slices they picked for their marketing images. Get up toward the rib cage and lungs and ultrasound isn’t going to be doing the magical things they claim.
Even this post hedges with “if it’s high resolution” claims, but we already know what the resolution looks like. You can see the images they’re producing and they’re pretty rough. They’re using sensors from another ultrasound company so it’s not like they made a breakthrough. The concern now is that they’re going to start trying to make up for the limitations of ultrasound by having AI process the images into something that looks more impressive and hides the limitations of the technology.
I don’t know why this particular Tweet is trending, because it doesn’t seem to add anything at all to the conversation. If you spend any time on Twitter this feels like template engagement bait designed to ride a popular topic without adding anything to the conversation.
by Aurornis - Another thing that had me sort of scratching my head about this tweet were these sections (emphasis mine):
> If the Midjourney ultrasound is high resolution, harmless, inexpensive and convenient, people can get an initial scan...
> If the MIdjourney device can be repeated frequently, like weekly, at a low cost and is harmless..
This particular author is backtracking on his original idea that lots of frequent scans are bad, as long as they are cheap and accurate. But that's a pretty irrelevant side issue IMO when the vast majority of objections I've seen to Midjourney's announcement have been that qualified folks just don't believe the tech is medically feasible - it won't have the necessary resolution to discriminate findings.
I'm not faulting the author, who was quite clear where he did a rethink, but I do fault people who somehow think this is evidence that Midjourney's scanner will be viable.
TBH, while I don't think the Midjourney announcement is the same level of malevolence as Theranos, I don't think it was quite far off. I'm baffled that people think science and medicine should be done by a flashy website and PR-speak instead of the sober language of research reports, but I guess that's just a (sad, IMO) sign of the times.