This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.
Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.
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 ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).
This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.
I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").
It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.
I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
You gloom on one aspect, the smell. OP focuses instead on full body scans themselves, and the irrelevant issues with everyone's bodies they would highlight.
I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.
It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.
I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.
There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.
More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.
It's obviously a lie to get us to accept no tests due to limited machines. The same as when COVID started masks "didn't help" because they didn't yet secure enough supply for everyone, then when they did, suddenly the masks helped.
Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less. Our bodies are not special.
It's also ridiculous that the proposition goes like:
1. Doctor knows some tests will flag tumors or variations that look weird and that we shouldn't then go investigate all of them
2. Doctor shuts off their brain and will then investigate all of them by doing invasive procedures
Just knowing how many such variations there are and if they grow or not is useful information. But the doctors pretend like they are super smart before the test and super dumb right after.
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 accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.
So you are certainly correct but you can also tighten up your definitions for true positives as you have more information on your false positives. There may exist additional signal as well.
To your point though I think there is a difference between collecting and evaluating additional data sources and using them as diagnostic tools.
I suppose I fundamentally disagree with the implication of your post that there is no value in gathering further data for these reasons, it would seem to suggest we’re already diagnostically optimal and could not do better with additional signal.
Positive for what, exactly? Quoting convnet, above:
> The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Also, overdependency on "spas" for health information could lead to an atrophy of other sorts of medical information gathering and diagnosis. e.g., there's no mention in the dreamy description of this spa experience of getting a blood draw or a patellar reflex test.
That's precisely where medicine is headed: personalized medicine.
You [hopefully] won't have to become a rare missed diagnosis because you didn't fit the demographic for this or that screening test.
Cost of genomic analysis is exponentially decreasing, and so much progress is happening so quickly.
Consider for example how in cardiology we advanced from ASCVD's 10-yr prognosis, to the PREVENT 30-yr prognosis. And still most providers are using the ASCVD score for their patients.
You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.
The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.
A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.
If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless.
I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.
They kind of are. Spain doesn't have yearly physicals, and during a GP visit, they don't even take your blood pressure. Blood tests are extremely uncommon, unlike in British medicine, where they take your blood pressure every time and blood tests are so prevalent people usually request one from time to time despite having no symptoms.
Spain's example showed the above (or the lack of) doesn't increase all-cause mortality and even excelling in longevity statistics.
https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/a01_0455.html
This japanese article found "No clear-cut evidence exists to determine whether undergoing health checks leads to greater longevity and/or lower medical expenditures."
And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.
Medicine is not a statistical field. I've seen many times doctors dismissing someone "you're young, you can't have X". Although there is some truth in what you're saying: full body CT scans are on the rise now.
No you can't. Statistical tests assume independent data points. Testing the same individual repeatedly would be pseudoreplication, leading to wrong conclusions.
If you mean run different tests, where you collect different kinds of data from the same individual, sure but that's not something you can "just do" in the general case.
Hypertension is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause stroke, heart attack, or organ damage through long-term vessel strain, by which time damage may be irreversible; detecting it on time can prevent this with lifestyle changes and medication.
Diabetes is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause damage to blood vessels, nerves, kidneys, and eyes through chronic high blood sugar, by which time complications may be advanced; detecting it on time can prevent or delay this with treatment and lifestyle changes.
Hyperlipidemia is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause artery blockage through cholesterol buildup, by which time heart attack or stroke may occur; detecting it on time can prevent this with diet and medication.
Kidney disease is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause kidney failure through gradual loss of function, by which time dialysis may be needed; detecting it on time can slow progression.
Glaucoma is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause irreversible vision loss through optic nerve damage, by which time blindness may be permanent; detecting it on time can preserve vision.
At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office does it wrong).
What doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola since the prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.
You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.
> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).
Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.
The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.
There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.
This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.
In the rest of the world diagnostics aren’t expensive at all and medical data is centralized already (blood, MRI are almost routine for hospital visits, all data stored in govt systems).
During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.
I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode about the negative impact of full, generalized body scans on a patient's wellbeing decades ago.
> pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing.
Somebody should make a startup based around the idea of diagnosing diseases through eg. a drop of blood. Probably need a bunch of big name investors though
So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).
On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.
EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.
LNT is the null hypothesis. No one disagrees a linear model fits the data very well in high doses. If you want to argue that model doesn't work in low doses, you need a model with more parameters and sufficient data to fit it. The issue is that, at these low doses we want to differentiate, we're also looking at effect sizes that are hard to separate from noise, and sampling biases that are hard to erase. There's still lively and ongoing debate.
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place (https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry...).
The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
From my understanding of the post, the waves that are created are smaller than light waves, and there's no evidence that light waves, sound waves or sub-sonic waves have any aneurysm-causing effects.
(I researched more and found in the video a value)
The waves are 50 nanometres, and this is basically the equivalent of having a full body ultrasound. We've been doing baby ultrasounds for decades with no ill effects, so I can't imagine this being different
Could you expand on the term "working"? Do you mean like "working to slowly lower a person into water while videos of animated Figma UIs play back on a monitor?" Or do you mean some crazy kind of "working", like "the ring of devices we see are scanning the organs of the woman we see and the images appearing on the monitor are those just-captured organ scans?"
The first video appears to be real. Who knows if it's a working prototype or just a mockup, but the fact that it's held together by C-clamps and other stuff you could get at Home Depot makes me lean towards the former. If it was purely for marketing they'd probably make it look more polished.
This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.
My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!
Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.
On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!
Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?
Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.
Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article:
> As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.
I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.
This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.
1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.
I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.
It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.
More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.
Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.
This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.
> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.
What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.
The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.
So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk
The false positive rate is the entire risk.
When you go to the doctor for a physical they don't run all of the blood tests they can. They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
Some tests have been removed from routine exams, or at least discouraged, because they were producing more false positives and harm than what they were saving.
Full body scans are deep on the end of the spectrum of tests with high false positive rate when ordered without supporting symptoms. That's the risk.
> People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
Not really how it works in real life. When you get a full body scan, especially with ultrasound, there are a lot of benign things that can show up that vaguely look like non-benign things. Even if the interpretation is "probably nothing", many people start worrying and think they need to get more tests just to be safe. Even people who don't see themselves as "armchair physician" will start thinking that they should at least rule out the worst case because they wouldn't want to die of cancer having known that something might have been there.
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
More often it leads to people thinking they have issues when they don't.
The same thing happens with blood tests: You can order all the blood tests you want if you're willing to pay for them. If you order enough, you will get some that show up as abnormal. You can start spending tens of thousands of dollars ruling things out and never catch any real issues.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
Isn't the way we decide what justifies intervention by comparing observational data, action and outcomes? Currently our observations are limited by many things including the cost and side effects. More frequent or better observations will improve the assessment of what justifies interventions.
That sounds more like a capitalism issue, to be honest. Treatment = revenue, so of course there will be unscrupulous individuals who will bend their oath and let patient anxiety drive care.
The trick seems like it would be to strongly incentivize waiting and watching any symptomless anomalies if further investigation is invasive. If you're getting 60 second scans every month then something growing will be catchable and something static or that disappears can be ignored until the next scan.
Maybe there is a bias for action within our moral and legal system. Fundamentally if you can deal with uncertainty correctly or "perfectly" wouldn't more information always be better?
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
No one is saying that we should stop looking. Especially not the commenter you replied to. They're saying the tech Midjourney presented isn't _gud_ enough to justify frequent scanning.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
> This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
Exactly this. I mean, even if the scan is really indeterminate, at a minimum you can simply wait, then scan again. If it's truly something serious, it will become determinate at some point. Doing this is still better than nothing and carries no risks of unnecessary procedures.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.
Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.
Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.
False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.
If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.
If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.
This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.
Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.
Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.
In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.
As we gain more data, might we be able to find patterns in that data that we now cannot see? I'm not only thinking of these regular scans but combining it with other data sources, like maybe regular, more complete blood panels, Apple Watch data, whatever we can get our hands on. Maybe we can find data points that together have a lower false-positive rate, like lump plus increased nightly body temperature plus weight loss.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. That test is wildly more accurate for you than it would be for me, and even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the positive tests would be wrong.
Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.
Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.
The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.
If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?
It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
I read the site and it seemed pretty clear? It's a 3d, transparent, high res image of your whole body reconstructed from the wave data from a large number of high frequency ultrasound scans. But it's also a high end spa in San Francisco that softly scans your body. Then, you uh, do as you want with the data (presumably show it to your doctor, who will be perhaps bemused)?
Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.
Yeah, that's not just 'cart before the horse', it's more like cart before the wheel. They make a bunch of extraordinary claims yet offer zero evidence, info or even a plausible hypothesis on how those claims might be possible at the scale, timeframe (2027) and unit economics implied. Thank goodness they really thought through the accent lighting for a calming user experience though. Otherwise, I might have been concerned they're not serious. </s>
But they have a picture showing a higher resolution Ultrasound CT result than a 1978 MRI! Surely that's important and useful information by which we can judge their product.
I did see that. And it does look better. Okay, I'm sold! Sign me up for my spa visit including avocado facial peel, genital waxing and computed axial tomography ultrasound.
More seriously, I assumed that CT Ultrasound image is from Butterfly's actual FDA-approved handheld medical device, not the Midjourney 360 submerged ring - as there's no evidence that is working. Since the Midjourney site has no helpful information, I just asked a friendly AI to do a comparison of what's actually proven to work in the Butterfly chip which Midjourney licensed and this 360 degree, full body, submerged concept - and essentially what's not been proven to work are those three differences: 360 degree ring of 40 butterfly chips, full body at once (requiring solving distance and speed challenges as well as a massive signal processing problem to extract and denoise signal), and doing it submerged.
1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.
2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.
3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.
4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.
I can only imagine the swarm of AI agents constantly feeding into this project at different levels of product development and even management. (To be fair, if it works out, it might become a template for future "AI-led organizations")
There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
Ultrasound is totally harmless, but doctors recommend ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable"). Average baby is exposed to 50 - 90 minutes of ultrasound over three visits, though we had to go more frequently for scans for all three of my kids. This would be 36 minutes if you went in every week. If it was possible to get medical quality anatomy scans and avoid transvaginal scans (either because of the tech or simply just going reguarly enough to catch all the imaging you need) then it would win the entire US market for sure: roughly $3-7B for the ultrasounds (3.5M US births at $1-2k per for ultrasounds). also it's a spa -- prenatal wellness spend in the US estimate at $5-7B.
First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute
I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
Instead of the value of evaluating a single scan, what about determinations made from evaluating regular deltas between images?
As a layperson, I'm mostly familiar with the concept of "get scanned, and a professional evaluates it"... are there scenarios where the approach of "imaging every few weeks, to make decisions based on trends" is currently done?
(From reading other comment threads here, I suspect the general answer is: other body-scanning startups have proposed the same thing, and it hasn't made sense)
As an aside, I could probably benefit from allergy shots, but the idea of having a regularly scheduled errand to do during the workweek is pretty unappealing, so I never seriously consider it.
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?
Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.
More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
> It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body.
This is exactly my thinking. There are decades of longitudinal studies behind the recommendations physicians make based on given levels of e.g. cholesterol in a standard blood test. And critically, those depend on standard protocols around administering and testing samples.
This would be brand new and would not have any of that infrastructure. Which all tech starts at, good. But I would expect Midjourney to need to dig in for a few decades to get and analyze clinical results and outcomes.
For body scans, I think about how few people would know if they have e.g. three kidneys (or other distortion), and how that impacts/doesn't impact their health.
Most people do not undergo autopsy after death, so it's possible there are correlates between good/bad health outcomes that frequent scanning would eventually reveal. But it would take significant time for this to be apparent.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.
Would it be suitable for basic body composition (as they claim in TFA)? DEXA is a big business and companies push a subscription model where they encourage you to get monthly scans. The results are really fun to look at and the dose is admittedly very low, but you're still getting rastered by an x-ray. It would also explain the spa angle and hence why they're doing that before going for regulation.
> 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.
As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.
At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”
3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.
I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) for with Medicare bonuses fo tracking vaccine information in the elderly.
if the first guy to watch his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to automate Rx dispersant, navigate poly pharmacology concerns, and not go to jail for narcotics crimes will be labeled to heretic.
This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!
Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?
Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.
I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.
The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.
It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.
Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.
"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.
Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs
One thing invents a bunch of fake bullshit using artist's work and the other is supposed to give you an image of something real and meaningful that wasn't just hallucinated or patched together. All from the guy who brought us Leap Motion, a gimmicky product that failed to live up to the hype. This isn't exactly encouraging. If it actually works we won't need a press release on their website, we'll hear about it in medical journals and it'll be doctors singing its praises. You'll find it being used in hospitols and not pop-up spas.
Only after that happens will I have to even consider how comfortable I am with the idea of handing over what they suggest will be massive amounts of highly personal medical data to this company and how much I trust them not to exploit that information for their own purposes and profit.
That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.
Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.
This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.
> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
> What This Leads To
> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.
There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.
There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.
What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.
I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.
I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?
Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?
For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
That's definitely an important point to consider, in fact something I think everyone in these conversations should be cognizant of, and also why it makes me believe the actual conversation should move to whether the device improves false positives/negatives rates or not (or at least has a chance to), which then might warrant wider access/use.
A better question is if people are going high-res, why not go high-res with tests whose accuracy is known, and for which there are useful, data-driven treatments?
Instead of casting a net of unknown quality every month, comparing against a null dataset (there does not exist a large dataset of these scans with outcomes for given markers).
Why not advocate cheap, easy blood/urine tests with higher frequency? Those tests do have large reference datasets with outcomes. And they have prescriptive value: there is likely more benefit to catching hypertension or diabetes earlier in more people.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
I'm not so worried about the data being useful, I'm worried about the machine actually working.
I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
> What's so bad about having some false positives?
Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.
It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.
After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.
When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.
It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and
- it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.
If you could obtain volumetric/3D ultrasound data that was not operator dependent, that would be great.
US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.
However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.
More just interested in medical imaging in general but: unobstructed soft tissue imaging is possible with this, e.g. abdomen. You can get reasonably good differentiation between types of tissues using ultrasound in this context although there is the potential for ambiguous findings where further scans like MRI will be required to get less ambiguous information about it.
Chest cavity, brain tissue scanning etc. will likely remain unrealistic as ultrasound waves won't penetrate bone and the ribs and skull will interfere.
I'm just guessing here but similar to a CAT scan, having actuators/probes at all angles could mean you can get an image around such obstacles. skull is probably an exception and it's the reason why we don't see any head scans in any one of the videos.
Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.
The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.
my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.
my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do 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.
...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?
Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.
Generative models have been used in healthcare for a while for things like drug design and data generation. Not to mention all the algorithms (and probably ML) used in generating results for MRI and CT scans. I don't think this is that crazy provided they can prove it's effective.
You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.
I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.
Well, the math is the other way. If you assume a 30 day month, you have 2,592,000 seconds each month to perform scans in. With 1,000,000,000 target scans and 50,000 machines, that's 20,000 scans per month per machine.
If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.
Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable.
Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).
Yep, and with full body submersion, they'll need to change out that water regularly. And people think data centers waste water, Midjourney says, "Hold my beer."
spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> 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.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.
I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?
I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.
It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.
Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".
Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.
Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.
Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.
This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.
Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.
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 ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).
This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.
I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").
It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.
I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.
If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
But we would have great data over time, both individually (weird tends to only matter if they are changing) and as a population.
> If the whole population had a full body scan every quarter, the “weird” things would feel more like the noise they are.
That's a tautology. We already have quite robust methods for detecting developed anomalies, treating every anomaly below standard human-to-human variation effectively raises the noise floor to already developed anomalies, defeating the purpose of population wide routine scans.
If you think the premise and conclusion of Op's statement form a tautology then you agree with him strongly.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
"It's a controversial and complicated idea. "
It is neither controversial nor complicated to detect some cancers by scent.
Taking the "headspace" of something is also not really complicated.
There are people who can reliably smell/detect Parkinson:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...
You gloom on one aspect, the smell. OP focuses instead on full body scans themselves, and the irrelevant issues with everyone's bodies they would highlight.
I think the anodyne to this is - and I admit the degree to which this is indicative of my biases! - more data, especially early on. Getting a good baseline before you have really any significant chance of most cancers to be able to do within-individual diffs, effectively, might be a big deal.
It might also reveal that every MRI shows ghost artifacts a half a dozen times that make it longitudinally useless, of course. I'm not foolish enough to think that epidemiologists haven't thought of this.
I've heard this argument before and it's always seemed downstream of capacity constraints and the current incentives of the healthcare industry.
There's a reason why billionaires like David Rockefeller, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch are able to live much longer lives than average, and having an oncall health team (that I'm sure does frequent testing and monitoring) is a big contributor to that.
More testing and data collection doesn't mean that every single anomaly would need to be investigated or communicated with the patient, but would provide a better longitudinal view that can help with disease prevention and health optimization.
It's obviously a lie to get us to accept no tests due to limited machines. The same as when COVID started masks "didn't help" because they didn't yet secure enough supply for everyone, then when they did, suddenly the masks helped.
Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less. Our bodies are not special.
It's also ridiculous that the proposition goes like:
1. Doctor knows some tests will flag tumors or variations that look weird and that we shouldn't then go investigate all of them
2. Doctor shuts off their brain and will then investigate all of them by doing invasive procedures
Just knowing how many such variations there are and if they grow or not is useful information. But the doctors pretend like they are super smart before the test and super dumb right after.
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 accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.
Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.
So you are certainly correct but you can also tighten up your definitions for true positives as you have more information on your false positives. There may exist additional signal as well.
To your point though I think there is a difference between collecting and evaluating additional data sources and using them as diagnostic tools.
I suppose I fundamentally disagree with the implication of your post that there is no value in gathering further data for these reasons, it would seem to suggest we’re already diagnostically optimal and could not do better with additional signal.
Sure collecting more data makes sense. We agree there. If that gets you to the required degree of statistical confidence my argument is moot.
Positive for what, exactly? Quoting convnet, above:
> The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.
The fundamental problem is that you generally can't diagnose simply from shapes. Scans show shapes, shapes cause concern, concern leads to invasive procedures, results are negative.
Also, overdependency on "spas" for health information could lead to an atrophy of other sorts of medical information gathering and diagnosis. e.g., there's no mention in the dreamy description of this spa experience of getting a blood draw or a patellar reflex test.
That's precisely where medicine is headed: personalized medicine.
You [hopefully] won't have to become a rare missed diagnosis because you didn't fit the demographic for this or that screening test.
Cost of genomic analysis is exponentially decreasing, and so much progress is happening so quickly.
Consider for example how in cardiology we advanced from ASCVD's 10-yr prognosis, to the PREVENT 30-yr prognosis. And still most providers are using the ASCVD score for their patients.
You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.
The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.
A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.
It's scary in both directions.
If you let it give out tons of false positives, then patients are trained to ignore it when it cries wolf.
If you dial it back so that it gives out fewer positives, then now it starts giving out false negatives and not helping sick people.
If this argument was as solid as you say, then all routine checks would be pointless.
I don't know about traditional blood testing, but a permanent implant which checks HR, pressure, glucose, temperature & oxidation would be pretty useful, not necessarily to diagnose anything, but to provide data for doctor when patient has actual symptomps.
They kind of are. Spain doesn't have yearly physicals, and during a GP visit, they don't even take your blood pressure. Blood tests are extremely uncommon, unlike in British medicine, where they take your blood pressure every time and blood tests are so prevalent people usually request one from time to time despite having no symptoms. Spain's example showed the above (or the lack of) doesn't increase all-cause mortality and even excelling in longevity statistics.
https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/a01_0455.html This japanese article found "No clear-cut evidence exists to determine whether undergoing health checks leads to greater longevity and/or lower medical expenditures."
Several published papers agree. There is in fact little evidence to support regular checkups if you’re asymptomatic.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/
And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/
I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.
Math does indeed make for solid arguments. If you want to make a counterargument then you have to address their math, which you didn't.
Medicine is not a statistical field. I've seen many times doctors dismissing someone "you're young, you can't have X". Although there is some truth in what you're saying: full body CT scans are on the rise now.
You can just run more tests to get increased statistical power.
No you can't. Statistical tests assume independent data points. Testing the same individual repeatedly would be pseudoreplication, leading to wrong conclusions.
If you mean run different tests, where you collect different kinds of data from the same individual, sure but that's not something you can "just do" in the general case.
Many smaht people have already pointed that out.
It's news to no one that tests are imperfect.
Do you have any concrete solution to that? Anything of value?
Yes, don’t do tests on asymptomatic low-risk people until you can demonstrate that a positive result has any meaning whatsoever.
Hypertension is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause stroke, heart attack, or organ damage through long-term vessel strain, by which time damage may be irreversible; detecting it on time can prevent this with lifestyle changes and medication.
Diabetes is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause damage to blood vessels, nerves, kidneys, and eyes through chronic high blood sugar, by which time complications may be advanced; detecting it on time can prevent or delay this with treatment and lifestyle changes.
Hyperlipidemia is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause artery blockage through cholesterol buildup, by which time heart attack or stroke may occur; detecting it on time can prevent this with diet and medication.
Kidney disease is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause kidney failure through gradual loss of function, by which time dialysis may be needed; detecting it on time can slow progression.
Glaucoma is asymptomatic for years and is prevalent in every demographic. Leaving it unattended it can cause irreversible vision loss through optic nerve damage, by which time blindness may be permanent; detecting it on time can preserve vision.
--------
I'm SO glad you're not my family doctor!
At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office does it wrong).
What doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola since the prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.
You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.
> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/
If you have a good doctor I suspect they’d agree with me.
Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.
The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.
There's a ton of variation within medical testing and tons of different conditions affect test results in similar ways. VERY FEW tests (test classes maybe: biopsy, microbiology, skeletal Rö) can yield diagnoses in the first place. Most testing is used to support (not confirm!) and reject possible interpretations.
This non-invasive everything-scanner sounds more like science fiction.
In the rest of the world diagnostics aren’t expensive at all and medical data is centralized already (blood, MRI are almost routine for hospital visits, all data stored in govt systems).
During Covid it was useful for improving protocols.
false positives are a real problem
Only if you let them. The false positive thing is a nonissue that only arises from assuming you would respond to information a certain way.
I don't really get what this means. A false positive causes issues inherently - you don't know if it's right or wrong. It's noise which is bad for care, and it's anxiety-inducing for patients which is also bad. It produces worse outcomes for everyone. There isn't a "choice" or assumption here, you respond to a positive as if it's accurate until you know it isn't. This is a known issue. Hell Scrubs did an episode about the negative impact of full, generalized body scans on a patient's wellbeing decades ago.
That makes no sense at all, unless you're saying that people should respond to all such information by ignoring it.
> pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing.
Somebody should make a startup based around the idea of diagnosing diseases through eg. a drop of blood. Probably need a bunch of big name investors though
So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).
On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.
EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.
[0]https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
> Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own
Is it? Linear No Threshold has largely been rejected at this point. https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed....
We have no evidence in favor of the linear no threshold model. That is not the same as saying that we have evidence against it.
There is some evidence for hormesis - but yes no model is proven right now. LNT is the most conservative model and part of why it sticks around.
A good primer: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2477686/
Sure but we don’t prove negatives for a reason - it’s impossible. We assume the null hypothesis.
LNT is the null hypothesis. No one disagrees a linear model fits the data very well in high doses. If you want to argue that model doesn't work in low doses, you need a model with more parameters and sufficient data to fit it. The issue is that, at these low doses we want to differentiate, we're also looking at effect sizes that are hard to separate from noise, and sampling biases that are hard to erase. There's still lively and ongoing debate.
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
It might not actually cause harm or strange effects to people's bodies, but I'd certainly feel better if it was tested and used by doctors in a hospital and not some "spa" since those tend to be poorly regulated and where all kinds of quackery takes place (https://www.aafp.org/afp/afp-community-blog/med-spa-industry...).
The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output. Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)
> The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output.
And the safety of the data as well. Am I supposed to entrust full body scans to a startup?
From my understanding of the post, the waves that are created are smaller than light waves, and there's no evidence that light waves, sound waves or sub-sonic waves have any aneurysm-causing effects.
(I researched more and found in the video a value) The waves are 50 nanometres, and this is basically the equivalent of having a full body ultrasound. We've been doing baby ultrasounds for decades with no ill effects, so I can't imagine this being different
We already ultrasound babies in the womb, so one would hope this has been studied.
that's not a video render of a hypothetical device, that's a real video of the real working device, fwiw
> the real working device
Could you expand on the term "working"? Do you mean like "working to slowly lower a person into water while videos of animated Figma UIs play back on a monitor?" Or do you mean some crazy kind of "working", like "the ring of devices we see are scanning the organs of the woman we see and the images appearing on the monitor are those just-captured organ scans?"
It's just a render? Where's the video?
The first video appears to be real. Who knows if it's a working prototype or just a mockup, but the fact that it's held together by C-clamps and other stuff you could get at Home Depot makes me lean towards the former. If it was purely for marketing they'd probably make it look more polished.
The first video has the actual device (whether it's functioning or not) and the second video is a render.
This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.
My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!
Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.
On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!
Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?
Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.
> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.
With "you" being a VC backed startup aiming for the next $1T IPO. What could possibly go wrong?
Midjourney is not VC backed. They have a bit about this in the article:
> As a reminder, Midjourney has no investors. We are a totally new kind of research lab. We've seen academic, corporate, and government labs - but we are a distinct (and curious) new thing: we are a community-backed research lab.
I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!
It seems like the radiology equivalent to a blood testing machine that could be deployed to walgreens and detect 100 diseases with a finger prick.
But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.
This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.
1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.
There's probably compute done on ram to reduce the file size before it hits disk. Definitely going to be redundant information in the scan.
I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
I have a cheap bridge to sell you
great, just confirm you also have >>$200MM revenue[0] and have also previously founded a hard tech startup!
[0] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/midjourney-revenue-...
Exactly. Don’t even try to get into medical imaging until you’ve made a heap of cash off a Discord waifu image bot
Let's see what you've built.
Made some bomb spam musubi earlier, thinking about a neutrino detector for the home now
Classic.
Let doers do.
If that’s your criteria, wait till you hear this way more successful guy’s pitch for data centers in space!
If that’s your thinking, I’m sorry but you’re just a sucker.
Grifters love you.
Totally agree.
This community can be much better than that.
This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.
It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.
More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.
Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.
This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.
> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.
What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.
The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.
So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
> it's _git gud_
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk
The false positive rate is the entire risk.
When you go to the doctor for a physical they don't run all of the blood tests they can. They only run them for specific symptoms and for specific preventative measures where we've calculated that the benefits outweigh the risks of a false positive.
Some tests have been removed from routine exams, or at least discouraged, because they were producing more false positives and harm than what they were saving.
Full body scans are deep on the end of the spectrum of tests with high false positive rate when ordered without supporting symptoms. That's the risk.
> People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
Not really how it works in real life. When you get a full body scan, especially with ultrasound, there are a lot of benign things that can show up that vaguely look like non-benign things. Even if the interpretation is "probably nothing", many people start worrying and think they need to get more tests just to be safe. Even people who don't see themselves as "armchair physician" will start thinking that they should at least rule out the worst case because they wouldn't want to die of cancer having known that something might have been there.
Why do you do it all?
Many countries with far better outcomes don’t do this, is it necessary, or is it just the product of an insurance driven health industry?
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
But does it also catch more issues early?
Rarely.
More often it leads to people thinking they have issues when they don't.
The same thing happens with blood tests: You can order all the blood tests you want if you're willing to pay for them. If you order enough, you will get some that show up as abnormal. You can start spending tens of thousands of dollars ruling things out and never catch any real issues.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
> If the false positive rate is demonstrably low
Regardless of how accurate a test is, by Bayes Theorem if it's done on enough healthy people the false positives will swamp the true positives.
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
Isn't the way we decide what justifies intervention by comparing observational data, action and outcomes? Currently our observations are limited by many things including the cost and side effects. More frequent or better observations will improve the assessment of what justifies interventions.
That sounds more like a capitalism issue, to be honest. Treatment = revenue, so of course there will be unscrupulous individuals who will bend their oath and let patient anxiety drive care.
The trick seems like it would be to strongly incentivize waiting and watching any symptomless anomalies if further investigation is invasive. If you're getting 60 second scans every month then something growing will be catchable and something static or that disappears can be ignored until the next scan.
Maybe there is a bias for action within our moral and legal system. Fundamentally if you can deal with uncertainty correctly or "perfectly" wouldn't more information always be better?
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
No one is saying that we should stop looking. Especially not the commenter you replied to. They're saying the tech Midjourney presented isn't _gud_ enough to justify frequent scanning.
That's not how the legal system works, though.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
This is fair, but I think it's better stated as you did than couched in language suggesting it's a matter of principle.
> This style of argument has always bothered me, because the correction to misdiagnosis or mistreatment is not to stop looking, it's _git gud_.
Exactly this. I mean, even if the scan is really indeterminate, at a minimum you can simply wait, then scan again. If it's truly something serious, it will become determinate at some point. Doing this is still better than nothing and carries no risks of unnecessary procedures.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.
Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.
Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.
Is the idea to use AI magic to detect cancer and other bad things?
I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months.
Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
Timing is also important. I can predict cancer with 100% success, because everyone will get cancer, unless they die of something else first.
False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.
If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.
If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.
This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.
Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem
Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.
In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.
As we gain more data, might we be able to find patterns in that data that we now cannot see? I'm not only thinking of these regular scans but combining it with other data sources, like maybe regular, more complete blood panels, Apple Watch data, whatever we can get our hands on. Maybe we can find data points that together have a lower false-positive rate, like lump plus increased nightly body temperature plus weight loss.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. That test is wildly more accurate for you than it would be for me, and even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the positive tests would be wrong.
Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.
Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.
The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.
If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?
It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
https://voices.uchicago.edu/pearsonlab/
Honestly if these bozos can't even write one first sentence that says what the FUCK this is, they have no hope for commercialization.
I read the site and it seemed pretty clear? It's a 3d, transparent, high res image of your whole body reconstructed from the wave data from a large number of high frequency ultrasound scans. But it's also a high end spa in San Francisco that softly scans your body. Then, you uh, do as you want with the data (presumably show it to your doctor, who will be perhaps bemused)?
> they have no hope for commercialization.
Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.
This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably
This made me spit my coffee out! Thanks for helping me start my day with a laugh. No comment otherwise :-P
Fair point. Definitely not a replacement; it’s meant to bridge the data gap.
They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd.
Is this some AI hallucination post?
My thoughts exactly. Some openclaw got loose.
The spa is brilliant. Think of corporate rec days that also cut insurance costs. Good lord, its like you're new to hypercapitalism :)
> They've lost the plot, especially with the spa.
Yeah, that's not just 'cart before the horse', it's more like cart before the wheel. They make a bunch of extraordinary claims yet offer zero evidence, info or even a plausible hypothesis on how those claims might be possible at the scale, timeframe (2027) and unit economics implied. Thank goodness they really thought through the accent lighting for a calming user experience though. Otherwise, I might have been concerned they're not serious. </s>
But they have a picture showing a higher resolution Ultrasound CT result than a 1978 MRI! Surely that's important and useful information by which we can judge their product.
https://cdn.midjourney.com/static/medical/media/first_mri_vs...
From: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery
I did see that. And it does look better. Okay, I'm sold! Sign me up for my spa visit including avocado facial peel, genital waxing and computed axial tomography ultrasound.
More seriously, I assumed that CT Ultrasound image is from Butterfly's actual FDA-approved handheld medical device, not the Midjourney 360 submerged ring - as there's no evidence that is working. Since the Midjourney site has no helpful information, I just asked a friendly AI to do a comparison of what's actually proven to work in the Butterfly chip which Midjourney licensed and this 360 degree, full body, submerged concept - and essentially what's not been proven to work are those three differences: 360 degree ring of 40 butterfly chips, full body at once (requiring solving distance and speed challenges as well as a massive signal processing problem to extract and denoise signal), and doing it submerged.
I have a mixed response:
1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.
2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.
3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.
4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.
Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.
Now society needs to vibe invest!
I can only imagine the swarm of AI agents constantly feeding into this project at different levels of product development and even management. (To be fair, if it works out, it might become a template for future "AI-led organizations")
There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
Ultrasound is totally harmless, but doctors recommend ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable"). Average baby is exposed to 50 - 90 minutes of ultrasound over three visits, though we had to go more frequently for scans for all three of my kids. This would be 36 minutes if you went in every week. If it was possible to get medical quality anatomy scans and avoid transvaginal scans (either because of the tech or simply just going reguarly enough to catch all the imaging you need) then it would win the entire US market for sure: roughly $3-7B for the ultrasounds (3.5M US births at $1-2k per for ultrasounds). also it's a spa -- prenatal wellness spend in the US estimate at $5-7B.
They don’t recommend them overly frequently because it’s unnecessary, but it’s not harmful to mom or the baby in any way.
First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute
I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.
radiologist here - example images don't look great
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
> I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this
Never underestimate the audacity of a software engineer with a new toy
> It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Well, if you replace LeBron with Jordan, and Bowling with Baseball ..
The founder of midjourney is not a software engineer.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
I'm pretty sure, like most things, it's better to wait and see what's built rather than take issue with their short marketing video.
It’s because no one has heard from mid journey in a few years so they’re pivoting
I mean, Michael Jordan did play for the White Sox for a hot second
Instead of the value of evaluating a single scan, what about determinations made from evaluating regular deltas between images?
As a layperson, I'm mostly familiar with the concept of "get scanned, and a professional evaluates it"... are there scenarios where the approach of "imaging every few weeks, to make decisions based on trends" is currently done?
(From reading other comment threads here, I suspect the general answer is: other body-scanning startups have proposed the same thing, and it hasn't made sense)
As an aside, I could probably benefit from allergy shots, but the idea of having a regularly scheduled errand to do during the workweek is pretty unappealing, so I never seriously consider it.
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?
Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.
But isn’t this much cheaper and easier so even if they are not quite a good, the accessibility and ease and thus much more data is better?
More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
> It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body.
This is exactly my thinking. There are decades of longitudinal studies behind the recommendations physicians make based on given levels of e.g. cholesterol in a standard blood test. And critically, those depend on standard protocols around administering and testing samples.
This would be brand new and would not have any of that infrastructure. Which all tech starts at, good. But I would expect Midjourney to need to dig in for a few decades to get and analyze clinical results and outcomes.
For body scans, I think about how few people would know if they have e.g. three kidneys (or other distortion), and how that impacts/doesn't impact their health.
Most people do not undergo autopsy after death, so it's possible there are correlates between good/bad health outcomes that frequent scanning would eventually reveal. But it would take significant time for this to be apparent.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.
Would it be suitable for basic body composition (as they claim in TFA)? DEXA is a big business and companies push a subscription model where they encourage you to get monthly scans. The results are really fun to look at and the dose is admittedly very low, but you're still getting rastered by an x-ray. It would also explain the spa angle and hence why they're doing that before going for regulation.
> 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.
As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3770049/
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.
At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”
3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.
I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) for with Medicare bonuses fo tracking vaccine information in the elderly.
if the first guy to watch his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to automate Rx dispersant, navigate poly pharmacology concerns, and not go to jail for narcotics crimes will be labeled to heretic.
This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!
It's obvious why they're doing this: there's a lot of money in healthcare.
What there isn't is good evidence that these full body scans actually improve outcomes.
Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?
https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20
This covers a lot more details than the announcement.
EDIT: Actually looks like their announcement has another page linked for more details containing this video.
slide 28
https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...
And slide 25, although it is questionable if this is really the result of such a device like Midjourney is presenting.
If it is then wow!
Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.
I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.
The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.
It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.
This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.
Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.
Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?
"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
That was probably not GP's point, but they can be. Sound-based weapons are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?
I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.
To me it reeks of desperation.
Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs
This is a full body ultrasound?
Medical I don't care about futuristic sounding stuff. Just show me evidence based and clinically useful testing.
Use AI and new scans to help sure but prove it works otherwise this could be another dead end.
> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.
Why don’t they approach this as a regular medical product?
With this spa angle I’m worried about hidden motives; perhaps data collection is a major goal. Or maybe this tech is not reliable enough.
I had to check whether this was some kind of an april fool joke.
It looks like a legit attempt. Wow. This is insanely innovative.
This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.
I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?
is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image
There's deterministic algos for it and have existed for ages.
Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.
> Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.
Where's your sense of fun and adventure? /s
One thing invents a bunch of fake bullshit using artist's work and the other is supposed to give you an image of something real and meaningful that wasn't just hallucinated or patched together. All from the guy who brought us Leap Motion, a gimmicky product that failed to live up to the hype. This isn't exactly encouraging. If it actually works we won't need a press release on their website, we'll hear about it in medical journals and it'll be doctors singing its praises. You'll find it being used in hospitols and not pop-up spas.
Only after that happens will I have to even consider how comfortable I am with the idea of handing over what they suggest will be massive amounts of highly personal medical data to this company and how much I trust them not to exploit that information for their own purposes and profit.
https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china
Remind me of this, radar based.
That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.
Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.
Genuine question.
Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.
This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.
> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
> What This Leads To
> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.
There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.
There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.
What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.
I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.
So if it works: Awesome.
The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
I think it is because they want something that feels nice so people will go there more often?
So they get more data of the same person over time.
It's probably hard to make it hygienic enough to be standard hospital equipment to be honest
So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?
No, you stand there for 60 seconds.
If every hospital had one, even if they sat idle 90% of the day, thats enough to hit that target.
So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?
Sounds good to me.
I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?
People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.
Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?
Great point. Scanning healthy people is one thing, people who truly need help (like myself) is another!
Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...
This is interesting & ambitious!
Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?
I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!
This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.
For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.
I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month?
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
There's a world of difference between the health checkups we get in Japan, and something like a full-body MRI/CT.
You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.
Are you joking? 人間ドック is absolutely more than a "health checkup". Maybe do some reading: https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
That is not the same as the annual mandatory health check.
Maybe your employer pays for you to get a more comprehensive checkup by default and you're unaware of this?
But the ones vast majority of population here gets do not include MRI or CT or Endoscopy.
And, _even then_; specific checkups when you're looking for _specific things_ are still very different things than a full-body MRIs.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
I don't read the parent comment to take issue with the use case per se but the billion scans per month figure.
Surely, whatever this is giving you, getting a scan once a month must be plenty. They need a billion people to get a scan every month.
Because false positives have a tremendous emotional (and, depending on your healthcare system, also monetary) cost to patients.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
That's definitely an important point to consider, in fact something I think everyone in these conversations should be cognizant of, and also why it makes me believe the actual conversation should move to whether the device improves false positives/negatives rates or not (or at least has a chance to), which then might warrant wider access/use.
A better question is if people are going high-res, why not go high-res with tests whose accuracy is known, and for which there are useful, data-driven treatments?
Instead of casting a net of unknown quality every month, comparing against a null dataset (there does not exist a large dataset of these scans with outcomes for given markers).
Why not advocate cheap, easy blood/urine tests with higher frequency? Those tests do have large reference datasets with outcomes. And they have prescriptive value: there is likely more benefit to catching hypertension or diabetes earlier in more people.
True, though those things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
Theoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.
From what I've read, full body scans are awful for this--your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
I'm not so worried about the data being useful, I'm worried about the machine actually working.
I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
> What's so bad about having some false positives?
Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.
It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
> your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
Um, that's still a tumor.
Yeah but it's not cancer.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
I would guess build a health prediction model. Instead of next text token or next frame in a video, how about next 12 months or years of body health?
Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.
Who reads these scans and who assume liabilities for missed reads?
AI[no one]. The customer.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
The top 100,000 families taking this scan every day would still put them 2 magnitudes below the target.
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
What? This comment chain is specifically about the target of a billion full-body scans a month using 50,000 units.
That's about 1 scan per unit, every 2 minutes, 24/7.
50,000 hypochondriacs could pull that off easily
It's really not OK to victimize the rich like this either.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Isn't therapy or enlightenment ultimately cheaper?
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
I can’t tell if this is serious or a top tier joke.
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.
Part of me is super excited about this.
The other part wonders if this is the next clinkle.
MJ has shipped stuff before though so I’m optimistic.
Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.
After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.
When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.
It is in fact very probably a bad idea. A good search term here is "incidentaloma". The balance of evidence currently appears to suggest that full body scans for asymptomatic patients are a net negative for health.
Those claims are extremely suspect and completely support the current rationing and power structure of healthcare.
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
It would radically alter medicine.
How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
Yes, it's the healthcare industry's fault, they're brainwashing me into not getting more procedures. Sounds very plausible.
Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.
Because a lot of the hatred for AI is just hysteria.
Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice
Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality
If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market
Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.
Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?
If you could obtain volumetric/3D ultrasound data that was not operator dependent, that would be great.
US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.
However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.
edit: clarification
More just interested in medical imaging in general but: unobstructed soft tissue imaging is possible with this, e.g. abdomen. You can get reasonably good differentiation between types of tissues using ultrasound in this context although there is the potential for ambiguous findings where further scans like MRI will be required to get less ambiguous information about it.
Chest cavity, brain tissue scanning etc. will likely remain unrealistic as ultrasound waves won't penetrate bone and the ribs and skull will interfere.
Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?
MRI uses EM radiation in the radiowave frequency band. This is using sound.
And doesn't bone pretty much block all ultrasound waves? There is a time and place for ultrasound, just like there is for MRI or Xray.
So im curious to know the limitations of this device
I'm just guessing here but similar to a CAT scan, having actuators/probes at all angles could mean you can get an image around such obstacles. skull is probably an exception and it's the reason why we don't see any head scans in any one of the videos.
Also I imagine it pretty difficult to get good data from that because of all the muscles that do stuff if put in water and you would hold your breath.
There is no way people will put up with that.
Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.
Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong
Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.
The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.
my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.
my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?
we're hitting the hype peak shortly
It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.
This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.
Where is the belly button?!
Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?
Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?
Most isn't 3d, it's hand positioned single slices.
The math does not math
They made the opening credits from Westward.
Congrats!
Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.
Is this company public? Can I short them?
What the actual fuck
> 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.
...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?
Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?
This would be really cool if it comes to fruition and works in the way they want it to.
Given the source, I will treat it as nonsense science fiction until it’s built, functional and scientifically tested.
> "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"
FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.
Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
[0] https://sytse.com/cancer/
Strong theranos vibes
There's a certain type of people the Midjourney folks are involved with in SF. They're high on their own supply. See also hacker houses etc
But why? It doesn’t say why?
I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.
This is the most "getting high on your own supply" I have ever seen.
What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?
Surely they have a paper or something on this?
The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?
Generative models have been used in healthcare for a while for things like drug design and data generation. Not to mention all the algorithms (and probably ML) used in generating results for MRI and CT scans. I don't think this is that crazy provided they can prove it's effective.
You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.
I was trying to say there's precedent for using ML in this field. I don't think they even said this product is an image generation model. It's probably some ML version of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography
I also found this researcher on their staff who studies tomography https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=idvD2yYAAAAJ
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.
I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?
They founded LeapMotion previously which was pretty big and totally unrelated to AI. They've been doing all sorts of shenanigans it seems
Also fmr cofounder of leap motion, which developed a mouse that didn't you to touch it!
> can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
What do you mean here?
The idea came from LLMs? They built this with LLMs?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
So the idea is Midjourney uses LLMs as a sounding board and came up with this idea?
You can just build things
“Just building” radiation emitters like CT scanners is a bad idea.
This is ultrasound. You didn’t read the article. It’s perfectly safe.
The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.
Well, the math is the other way. If you assume a 30 day month, you have 2,592,000 seconds each month to perform scans in. With 1,000,000,000 target scans and 50,000 machines, that's 20,000 scans per month per machine.
2,592,000 seconds / 20,000 scans = 129.6 seconds/scan
If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.
Apologies, must have got the maths wrong somewhere in the middle, but anyone who has ever had a medical scan will know that 2 minutes is laughable.
Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).
Yep, and with full body submersion, they'll need to change out that water regularly. And people think data centers waste water, Midjourney says, "Hold my beer."
Need an update from Elon about what he meant when he said "Midjourney is not mid" and what he thinks now https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784
This shit is immune to parody, it’s the most California thing to ever exist. “We’ll fix your health problems with an AI spa”. A spa. Give me a break.
This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!
At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.
spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho
I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.
This is a joke, right?
Yes it's a joke, instead of this project we should wait for officially approved doctors to come up with this in 2060
What reason is there to believe that will happen?
Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
How are people possibly taking this seriously?
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> 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.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
2 inches / sec * 60 sec = 120 inches = 10 ft ? It also doesn't seem like it scans your head from what I've seen.
Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?
I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise.
But hey if not, actually cool.
Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.
Presumably you can just hang from above.
I doubt it. Would that not interfere with the scan? I’ve really no idea on the merits of this.
Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.
I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?
I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.
it would suck if Chinese tech advanced medical care faster or made it cheaper.
Being realistic is good
It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.
Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".
Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.
Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.
Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.