alt Hacker NewsMidjourney Medical
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If this all works, and becomes widely available, I wonder if people would get a lot of health anxiety. Now they can see stuff that is normal, but strange or unexpected.
I’m no doctor by any means, but what if, as an example, an organ fluctuates in size, or composition, naturally. A medical professional would know these things, but a random person off the street might get stressed out and start to panic, or perhaps overcompensate with their diet or something.
I think more data is generally good, but data without context or insight can be problematic.
I won't have an opinion until Brian Johnson tells me how much younger this makes him.
This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.
If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.
Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.
(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)
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.
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.
Massive Theranos vibes.
You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.
The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.
So if it works: Awesome.
The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.
Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.
Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.
I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.
>"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed."
Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.
Awesome work. The second video is great. I don’t know enough about medical science to consider viability and shortcomings, but I’m impressed by the dream. Keep cooking.
And even if the device fails, I’m sure the spa will be nice.
I can only applaud. Regardless of whether this device is possible, or economically viable, this is a brave move and a bold vision. Taking bigger risks is what what makes the advances possible.
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.
People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.
So it's what, computational ultrasound? Why are they making it sound so much like they're going to steal my kidneys?
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?
> 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?
Wonderful stuff, good job Midjourney.
An AI can be trained on body scans to detect diseases, tumours etc. Ideally this can be trained on real scans with real diseases but you could also train on synthetic data (synthetic bodies and/or synthetic diseases).
You can also focus ultrasonic waves to destroy (vaporise or cook) diseased tissue.
> Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.
Why is that almost every LLM generated article sounds like a LinkedIn motivational post?
(this is not a rhetorical question, I would really like to know why, from all the writing styles, this is the most prevalent one)
So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?
Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?
> As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.
Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.
Imaging is not preventive care. Exercise is. Good food without chemicals is. Good sleep is.unfortunately these important parts cannot easily be monetized to provide stock options to the insiders/
Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...
This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.
> 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.
They should ask their LLM for fun things to do in prison! Or ask Elizabeth Holmes.
This is one of the creepiest "big AI" product launches I've read. I know it's becoming a meme, but that spa looks like something from a Black Mirror episode.
If they were just creating a new less-invasive and differently informative alternative to fMRI / PET / EEG / CT for researchers and doctors to use in hospitals, where experienced human doctors were given agency in finding out how best to use the tool and interpret the results (understanding all the caveats that go for full body scans, false positive rates and so on[0]), then that would be amazing, a tiny step forward for the human race. But packaged like this, eww.
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?
Always trump with the savior card when bad PR¹ starts creeping in.
https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china
Remind me of this, radar based.
"when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging
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.
I just cried watching that intro video!
It's like, wow, us humans have a new tool to help us be our best!
Beautiful!
one nice thing may be way to enhance penetrative ultrasound eg smaller immersive ultrasound tomography in smaller dip tank hey stick your leg in this thinner immersive tunnel , e.g., extremity up-close immersion or trunk wrappers vs just wand-based?
> Midjourney Spa
Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms
I thought this was a satire at first
Hell yeah, my AI image generation company is now running an alternative medicine AI MRI-alternative imagine spa. Hell yeah.
This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.
Well that's certainly an interesting pivot, when Midjourney where set to announce hardware, who predicted this?
Sounds like programmers woke up from a fever dream and decided they can come up with an idea and flesh out the details later.
I personally have been dealing with an elbow injury for over 3 years. I have been to all the known places in the bay area and shown it. One surgery, countless doctors (some who took MRIs), and many physiotherapy sessions later the problem still exists.
I believe if a willing doctor takes images all over the elbow, and looks carefully, they will find the cause. But they aren’t willing.
Disappointed with the healthcare here, I for one, would love a solution that takes comprehensive data of my body and tell me what’s going on.
Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality
This is surely trolling? "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" has quite the acronym..
How much is a scan going to cost? The video motions petabyte per scan? These types are scans (medical images) are extremely dense and large in size, storing short or long term images sounds like its going to be extremely expensive when combined with AI analysis, etc. Not to Mention the cost of operating a Spa is not cheap, especially if your buying real estate, and the cost of the machine itself.
Is this a dystopian Spa, where full scans cost 50k, and basic ones are 1-5k?
I have seen AI projects to convert a tomography into actual 3D models.
Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.
This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.