alt Hacker NewsI find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive.
But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. But, at the same time, it is likely that it isn't a problem. And now, you will be stressed about the chance of having some health condition and spend time and money digging into a rabbit hole of what the issue could be, only to find out it was nothing.
They also don't say anything about the price of such a machine. If they really envision a future where everyone can easily get a scan, this is a crucial factor.
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Overdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that.
Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.
Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.
If this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?
I thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that.
https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-...
> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
MedLifeCrisis the youtube channel has a great video [1] on why you shouldn't full body scan. He's a consultant (highest level of doctor) in the NHS in England (and has done a PhD and research as is common in the UK medical system).
> chances are that the scan will show something unusual
Something unusual in a single one-off scan vs something unusual and changing over the course of multiple scans give two different views.
I learned this from watching House. I am certain that it's true, but I also kind of wonder how much backpressure there is against this kind of thing because the scanners are also insanely expensive to run per minute.
"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook.
Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good.
I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.
>> But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan.
People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!
Another reason is that we don't actually know what negative effects regular "scans" might have.
Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.
SOTA ultrasound devices are still very expensive, with e.g. a custom 3D probe with a few hundred piezo elements costing well over 10k. IF they want to use MEMS probe instead of piezo (which is implied by them saying that they will use a chirp), that's going to be even more expensive, considering the lack of manufacturing know-how. When sufficiently scaled, I wouldn't say it is an exorbitant price for large research hospitals, but I am a little skeptical of rolling these out as a health checkup "spa" service outside of areas with extreme wealth concentration (e.g., Silicon Valley? Sure. London? Yeah; Minneapolis? not so sure.)
I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.
Agreed, If you look for issues, you'll find them.
Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).
In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).
Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature?
I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.