Midjourney Medical

There is no way I am letting an AI image generator take scans of my naked body

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.

Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

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.

Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?

I'm sure I read that 30% will be immortal there, but suddenly the blog post changed... :)

Thank you very much, Midjourney.

If some of my doctors were software engineers I probably would be dead by now.

Or mid-dead.

So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?

Sounds good to me.

If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market

Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.

At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.

Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.

AI is about to find out the difference between talking and doing. Exciting!

Anyone know the song that's playing in the demo?

I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!

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?

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.

Elysium is playing out right before our eyes

Why not have 5,6 rings at different levels and do it live in 3D?

Where is the belly button?!

This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:

a) it is possible to construct such a scanner

b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything

c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful

But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.

I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise.

But hey if not, actually cool.

they call it Promethean Spas... Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver.

Are we at peak AI yet?

AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up

They will do everything but not release the API

Welcome back theranos

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.

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) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.

If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.

Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?

ER Nurse here:

This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.

The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.

So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.

These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.

Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.

I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.

What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...

Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.

I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve

The math does not math

Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.

Interesting but many issues which have been listed here are valid. This is my take on the largest of them.

Preventive testing is not always positive. False negatives creates a false sense of security and false positives drives unnecessary medical procedures. For example, what if this instrument sees "something" and a doctor then follows up with a biopsy, x-ray or explorative surgery. These will all have negative side effects. There has even been a debate of if mammography is a net positive. I think it might be but I'm just saying that even such a thing is debatable. The question is not only if the these early tests find anything, its also a question of whether detecting it early changes the prognosis. Maybe its untreatable anyway? Or maybe it would still be treatable if detected later? And then comes the cost of course, is it economical to do these scans on a population level relative to the alternative cost.

Building medical systems is not for the faint of heart. I was part of a startup building a Micro CT system with the long term goal of using it to detect tumors in biopsies live during surgery (1 um resolution for cm-sized samples) without waiting a week for the normal analysis. We also started with non-medical instrument (general research) and we never got to the medical instrument before we ran out of money (we engineers were too bad at sales). But we did study up on the (European) standards quite a bit. They are not crazy in any way. Its simply that you follow good engineering practice BUT it is hard to move from building a non-medical system to medical system after the fact. The standard is a process standard so it basically says "You should have followed this process when you designed your product". And you need be real careful setting your Intended Use and showing that you have Verified and Validated that your system can be used for the intended use. So most likely they need to build one product now (Body Composition Analysis), use that for research and then set up their Quality Management System before they rebuild everything from requirements to risk analysis to test plans to hardware to software. 10 years is probably on the low side for this and quite the cost.

TL;DR: "Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body."

Dolphins aside, is this basically a new angle on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography?

Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?

This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.

You don't need to build a perfect med spa, you only need to control the patents of the key pieces of a med spa.

This is nothing more thab a prophylactic patent grab to stifle competition and progress in this space for the next decade and/or hoover up patient data behind a paywall where they will gladly lease the weights and bias cure to you own disease back to you in the form of a subscription.

Is this company public? Can I short them?

They made the opening credits from Westward.

Congrats!

THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?

1) what?

Who needs a head anyway?

This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it

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.

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 insane thing to happen to medical imaging

To understand Midjourney Medical (MM), think about current major options: - CT/X-ray: harmful if done too much && can't do for pregnant women - MRI: slow, have to stay still, no metal - Ultrasound: really low fidelity

Midjourney Medical is fast, high fidelity, and perfectly safe!

The holy trifecta.

Insane vision. Insane work. Hats off to the team

i want a full body scan from the friendly discord app.

> 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?