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I've been working on a bootstrapped company building a low-cost MRI for about a year now. We're hoping to have a demonstrable prototype in another year or so.
by highd 10y ago
I've been working on a bootstrapped company building a low-cost MRI for about a year now. We're hoping to have a demonstrable prototype in another year or so.
So we think that we can get to that future where people pick MRI based on application and not cost or availability.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoI'm so glad to hear that. I've been thinking for years that MRIs seem like an industry that could and should be disrupted. The benefits could be massive. I'm not in the medical field, but I really believe the future of cancer medicine will strongly lean towards prevention and early detection, as opposed to just cure.
- highd 10y agoRegarding cancer, we think you're right. That and possibly maintenance - for example, most prostate cancers are asymptotic for life if untreated. For slower cancers that are acquired in old age it can make sense to use less aggressive chemotherapies that maintain quality of life. We think that being able to monitor the development of the cancer closely and frequently is a key component of enabling future therapeutic approaches like that.
- gozur88 10y agoWhere I live there used to be radio advertisements for a service that would give you a full body MRI in an effort to find cancers that could be treated before they spead. After a bit of reseach I discovered it's a false promise. A lot of people have benign lumps and growths they can carry around for a lifetime without any trouble, and while MRIs are quite safe biopsies are not. If you don't have a reason to think you might have cancer, i.e. the MRI is a screening tool and not being used for a diagnosis, the very small chance you'll die of complications from unnecessary biopsies outweighs the very small chance you'll save your life by discovering a treatable malignant growth. At least, that was the state of the art 7-8 years ago.
- Dove 10y agoI've heard the same said of getting mammograms started earlier in life: they don't recommend it because the time spent chasing benign lumps is neither safe nor efficient. This always seemed to me a terrible indictment of how medicine is practiced. Knowing that, do you have to chase down every lump your screening finds? Can you not consider the benefits of investigating further based on the dangers of doing so, the risk factors the patient has, maybe even what you see in successive scans over time? I am not a doctor, but there seems something unhealthy about a system in which you are advised to avoid learning information about yourself in order to avoid treatment.
- highd 10y agoI think you're exactly right - more frequent, less expensive testing means we have to change the criteria that mandates further investigation. One dilemma I've been thinking about recently is that there's an unfortunate burden put on care providers due to litigation that results in increased cost - the provider or radiologist that sees a "maybe" or a "shadow" on an image has to order a biopsy just to protect themselves from being sued on the off 1% chance that the thing becomes a serious health concern. In an environment where consumers evaluated their medicine based on value/$ they would be further dissuaded from a biopsy, but in America the nature of medical insurance disincentives this sort of cost analysis skepticism.
- jeffdavis 10y agoThe incentives aren't aligned. A doctor who sees a lump and does nothing has a huge downside risk: it could be malignant and everyone will believe that the doctor is at fault. A doctor who orders the test will never be blamed for a fluke complication during a biopsy. It's hard to resolve becuse it's not even about money. It may be the doctor who is blaming himself.
- saalweachter 10y agoThe doctor or the patient; if you're told that there is a lump (or seventeen) and it's probably nothing but you can get it checked out if you really want, most people will blame themselves if they don't get something checked out that later turns out to be something, and they know it.
- arijun 10y agoOut of curiosity, what are the cost cutting changes you're making? I've wondered why there are no MRIs using high temperature super conductors yet, it seems like such an obvious way to cut costs (as you don't need the extreme cryogenics).
- highd 10y agoI can't go too much into details, but suffice it to say that we're not using super conductors at all. High T super conductors will be very interesting in the next decade, I think, but right now there are a few issues that I'm aware of: 1) The high T super conductors are almost all crystals, not ductile metals. This means it can be very difficult to form coils or other structures out of them. 2) High T super conductors generally can't withstand as high a magnetic field as the lower T super conductors. I'm not sure how practical a concern this is for MRI. The benefit of High T super conductors is that you switch from using liquid helium as your cryogen to liquid nitrogen. This is a major simplification, but we're not all the way to room temp yet, unfortunately.
- givinguflac 10y agoBest of luck! I sincerely hope you're successful.
- highd 10y agoThank you!
- danarlow 10y agoThere several manufacturers of YBCO wire now, e.g. http://www.superpower-inc.com/content/2g-hts-wire http://www.superpower-inc.com/content/2g-hts-wire
- Baeocystin 10y agoThe specs given by the wire you linked is much more impressed than I would have guessed. Particularly the ability to maintain performance at tight radius. Glad to see things are progressing!
- cgh 10y agoThis will be huge for sports injuries, eg labrum tears. The cost and/or the wait for an MRI is often prohibitive.
- djrogers 10y agoWhere do you find this to be the case? I'm in California and both times I've had an MRI, I had an appointment within a week (non-emergency) and while I don't remember the cost for the first one, my most recent on last month cost me around $500 - that's not a copay, that's total cost, no insurance. It's not exactly $20, but I'd hardly call it prohibitive.
- lostlogin 10y agoPlease please please get some radiographer input on the interface. The horror that is out there is just so dire. I have some fantastic screenshots tucked away somewhere of the things that users are subjected to.
- Brakenshire 10y agoInteresting also about the data interface, I wonder whether you can get full data out of a standard MRI, or whether you can only look at it through a proprietary interface.
- lostlogin 10y agoThat area isn't too bad. The format is Dicom and is pretty good at giving you what you want. The format has a ton of metadata per image, and so extra stuff can be written into empty fields for novel imaging applications. Different vendors do different things, but it's not too hard to do a "if Siemens 3T do x" A recent example was perfusing mapping, where different vendors encode data in voxels quite differently, resulting in radically different perfusion maps between vendors prior to correction. It's also not too hard to get the raw data out and actually reconstruct it somewhere else. However the raw data is huge and you would have to really loath yourself to want to do that.
- Brakenshire 10y agoThanks for taking the time to respond. I've been wondering about this for a while.
- lostlogin 10y agoIf you want a sample file it shouldn't be too hard to get one, but I believe there are various objects that off them - conectome might.
- lostlogin 10y agoIf you want a sample file it shouldn't be too hard to get one, but I believe there are various projects that offer them - conectome might.