16 ms·

Midjourney Medical

• qudat 4mo ago
  Anyone know the song that's playing in the demo?
• ricochet11 4mo ago
  https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20 https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20
  • busymom0 4mo ago
    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.
• tptacek 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ttoinou 4mo ago
    Yes it's a joke, instead of this project we should wait for officially approved doctors to come up with this in 2060
    • jakelazaroff 4mo ago
      What reason is there to believe that will happen?
• verandaguy 4mo ago
  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.
  • jofzar 4mo ago
    Theoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.
    • compass_copium 4mo ago
      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.
      • owenpalmer 4mo ago
        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?
        • genocidicbunny 4mo ago
          > 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.
• tills13 4mo ago
  The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?
  • potatoman22 4mo ago
    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.
    • noobermin 4mo ago
      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.
      • potatoman22 4mo ago
        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 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 https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=idvD2yYAAAAJ
• jofzar 4mo ago
  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?
  • jofzar 4mo ago
    Surely they have a paper or something on this?
  • nom 4mo ago
    Not a joke, they really think that doing billions of full body scans will reduce healthcare costs and make people less anxious. Any scientist not on the payroll will tell you the opposite. You will get millions of false positives, causing anxiety and unnecessary interventions. This has been studied extensively and we have the stats. I too wish I could just jump into a machine every month and it declares me free of cancer. Instead it will find new irregularities every time with no easy way to confirm it's benign. This idea does not work.
• Reubend 4mo ago
  I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?
  • cglan 4mo ago
    is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image
    • rich_sasha 4mo ago
      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.
      • ElProlactin 4mo ago
        > 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
    • autoexec 4mo ago
      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.
  • bschmidt300 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • 4mo ago
• donohoe 4mo ago
  Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.
  • fastball 4mo ago
    Presumably you can just hang from above.
    • donohoe 4mo ago
      I doubt it. Would that not interfere with the scan? I’ve really no idea on the merits of this.
      • fastball 4mo ago
        Why would that interfere with the scan?
• cglan 4mo ago
  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
• tanin 4mo ago
  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.
• bhouston 4mo ago
  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.
  • skavi 4mo ago
    it would suck if Chinese tech advanced medical care faster or made it cheaper.
  • ttoinou 4mo ago
    Being realistic is good
• NikolaNovak 4mo ago
  Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>
  • staticshock 4mo ago
    For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
• danpalmer 4mo ago
  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.
  • Jtsummers 4mo ago
    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.
    • danpalmer 4mo ago
      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).
      • Jtsummers 4mo ago
        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."
        • schmorptron 4mo ago
          you can build the datacenter right next to the tank and use the now-warm cooling water to pump into the tanks!
• omgwtfbyobbq 4mo ago
  So... Rampant point of care ultrasound? Sounds good to me.
• JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
  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.
• owenpalmer 4mo ago
  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?
• noobermin 4mo ago
  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.
  • ccheney 4mo ago
    Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?
    • noobermin 4mo ago
      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.
    • atq2119 4mo ago
      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 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.
      • ninjalanternshk 4mo ago
        The sci-fi writes itself. Someone hacks the spa’s schedule to find out when you’re getting your scan done, then hacks the machine to push the output to 11 when you’re in, and liquifies your insides. The first Midjourney Medical murder.
    • cootsnuck 4mo ago
      "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 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
• taneq 4mo ago
  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.
• benatkin 4mo ago
  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 https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784
• thorum 4mo ago
  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.
  • randycupertino 4mo ago
    > 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?
    • meric_ 4mo ago
      They founded LeapMotion previously which was pretty big and totally unrelated to AI. They've been doing all sorts of shenanigans it seems
    • sberens 4mo ago
      Also fmr cofounder of leap motion, which developed a mouse that didn't you to touch it!
  • rellfy 4mo ago
    You can just build things
    • WalterGR 4mo ago
      “Just building” radiation emitters like CT scanners is a bad idea.
      • oompydoompy74 4mo ago
        This is ultrasound. You didn’t read the article. It’s perfectly safe.
  • 4mo ago
• tfirst 4mo ago
  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.
  • nxobject 4mo ago
    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?
• genxy 4mo ago
  Where is the belly button?!
• themantalope 4mo ago
  radiologist here - example images don't look great
  • bhouston 4mo ago
    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?
    • themantalope 4mo ago
      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.
      • throwaway219450 4mo ago
        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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3770049/
    • rflrob 4mo ago
      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 https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
• causal 4mo ago
  So if it works: Awesome. The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • captainbland 4mo ago
    It's probably hard to make it hygienic enough to be standard hospital equipment to be honest
  • i5heu 4mo ago
    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.
• jdw64 4mo ago
  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.
  • tptacek 4mo ago
    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.
    • jdw64 4mo ago
      [dead]
    • abtinf 4mo ago
      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.
    • nihonde 4mo ago
      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.
      • tptacek 4mo ago
• devmor 4mo ago
  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.
• nearlyepic 4mo ago
  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.
• block_dagger 4mo ago
  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.
  • Cyclone_ 4mo ago
    To me it reeks of desperation.
• dyauspitr 4mo ago
  But why? It doesn’t say why?
• adonovan 4mo ago
  Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?
  • themantalope 4mo ago
    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
  • captainbland 4mo ago
    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.
• rvz 4mo ago
  At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.
• EduardLev 4mo ago
  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
  • davidivadavid 4mo ago
    2 inches / sec * 60 sec = 120 inches = 10 ft ? It also doesn't seem like it scans your head from what I've seen.
• rich_sasha 4mo ago
  Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.
• dogmatism 4mo ago
  Is this company public? Can I short them?
• sberens 4mo ago
  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!
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tennfown 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • EduardLev 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • sberens 4mo ago
      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-now-significantly-200-million https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/midjourney-revenue-...
      • jrflowers 4mo ago
        Exactly. Don’t even try to get into medical imaging until you’ve made a heap of cash off a Discord waifu image bot
        • moralestapia 4mo ago
          [flagged]
          • jrflowers 4mo ago
            Made some bomb spam musubi earlier, thinking about a neutrino detector for the home now
• AgentMasterRace 4mo ago
  The math does not math
• ericpauley 4mo ago
  Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?
  • bobmcnamara 4mo ago
    Most isn't 3d, it's hand positioned single slices.
• lokar 4mo ago
  Strong theranos vibes
• robertclaus 4mo ago
  Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?
  • themantalope 4mo ago
    MRI uses EM radiation in the radiowave frequency band. This is using sound.
    • concrete_head 4mo ago
      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
      • diabllicseagull 4mo ago
        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.
        • i5heu 4mo ago
          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.
• maz1b 4mo ago
  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.
  • Nikhil37475 4mo ago
    Fair point. Definitely not a replacement; it’s meant to bridge the data gap.
  • doctorpangloss 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • maz1b 4mo ago
      This made me spit my coffee out! Thanks for helping me start my day with a laugh. No comment otherwise :-P
    • reverius42 4mo ago
      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)?
      • doctorpangloss 4mo ago
        Sometimes I cannot wrap my mind around how funny people can be and how utterly humorless HN has become with its downvoting. @dang this is valid for the community too!
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• milchek 4mo ago
  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.
• ElenaDaibunny 4mo ago
  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
• amirhirsch 4mo ago
  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.
  • yalok 4mo ago
    is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
    • twostorytower 4mo ago
      They don’t recommend them overly frequently because it’s unnecessary, but it’s not harmful to mom or the baby in any way.
    • amirhirsch 4mo ago
      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.
• andrewinardeer 4mo ago
  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.
• storus 4mo ago
  Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.
• Nikhil37475 4mo ago
  Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.
• a-dub 4mo ago
  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?
• unholiness 4mo ago
  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 https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
  • carlosdp 4mo ago
    that's not a video render of a hypothetical device, that's a real video of the real working device, fwiw
    • datadrivenangel 4mo ago
      It's just a render? Where's the video?
      • roarcher 4mo ago
        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.
        • moffkalast 4mo ago
          > The first video appears to be real The video is clearly from Midjourney /s
• bschwindHN 4mo ago
  Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality
• Jabrov 4mo ago
  They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd. Is this some AI hallucination post?
  • bubblegumcrisis 4mo ago
    My thoughts exactly. Some openclaw got loose.
  • 1attice 4mo ago
    The spa is brilliant. Think of corporate rec days that also cut insurance costs. Good lord, its like you're new to hypercapitalism :)
  • mrandish 4mo ago
    > 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>
    • Jtsummers 4mo ago
      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_usct-c71b0a13f100c110.jpg https://cdn.midjourney.com/static/medical/media/first_mri_vs... From: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery
      • mrandish 4mo ago
        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.
• brianbest101 4mo ago
  I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.
• ludde 4mo ago
  Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?
  • adamredwoods 4mo ago
    Great point. Scanning healthy people is one thing, people who truly need help (like myself) is another!
• brcmthrowaway 4mo ago
  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
• Aurornis 4mo ago
  > 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.
  • Veedrac 4mo ago
    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.
    • 4mo ago
• avree 4mo ago
  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.
• bandrami 4mo ago
  If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market
• hidelooktropic 4mo ago
  Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-feat-mond%C3%ABna-quartet/1869766553?i=1869766559 https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...
• tyre 4mo ago
  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.
• decimalenough 4mo ago
  > 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?
• ddxv 4mo ago
  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.
• runako 4mo ago
  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?
• Yondle 4mo ago
  Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?
• dwd 4mo ago
  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.
• handwoven 4mo ago
  Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.
  • handwoven 4mo ago
    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")
  • zippyman55 4mo ago
    Now society needs to vibe invest!
• chhxdjsj 4mo ago
  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
• rasse 4mo ago
  Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.
• epsteingpt 4mo ago
  They made the opening credits from Westward. Congrats!
• hmokiguess 4mo ago
  This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.
• rdpfeffer 4mo ago
  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.
• mchusma 4mo ago
  Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.
• jablongo 4mo ago
  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!
• hoofedear 4mo ago
  Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice
  • wkoszek 4mo ago
    Yup. But it'd be good to get certainty by going to Walmart or CVS or Wholefoods and getting a scan for $30.
• koinedad 4mo ago
  This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.
• BrokenCogs 4mo ago
  Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?
• esafak 4mo ago
  This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!
• 1970-01-01 4mo ago
  So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?
  • geor9e 4mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • 1970-01-01 4mo ago
      A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion scans ago was last month? It does not work this way.
      • geor9e 4mo ago
        Do you need the math typed out?
        • Jtsummers 4mo ago
          In order for 50k scanners to perform 1 billion scans in a month, they need to be run nearly 24/7. It will require (in a 30 day month) an average of 129.6 seconds per scan, including both the 60 second scan time and moving people on and off the scanner surface. You get just over a minute to move someone off, clean the system, and get the next person onto the platform. If you neglect cleaning the system, and everyone is ready to go, then this is just barely possible if it's 100% reliable. If they sat idle for 90% of the time, they wouldn't have enough time for the 60 second scan, let alone moving people on and off the platform. The math for their claimed target does not work.
          • deleted 4mo ago
• kmoser 4mo ago
  > "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4mo ago
  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").
  • kilbuz 4mo ago
    false positives are a real problem
    • adastra22 4mo ago
      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.
• bozdemir 4mo ago
  This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.
• hubraumhugo 4mo ago
  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/ https://sytse.com/cancer/
• dodu_ 4mo ago
  I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise. But hey if not, actually cool.
• Cyclone_ 4mo ago
  People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.
• mNovak 4mo ago
  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)!
  • intoXbox 4mo ago
    MRI physicist here as well. I have a basic understanding of ultrasound, and this looks like an array of transducers organized to perform tomography, just as CT did for Xray. However Ultrasound quality depends highly on transducer-skin contact. Any physicists here to comment on the effects of sonar through liquid and the effects on image resolution and field of view?
    • apaprocki 4mo ago
      This paper, “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography”, goes into more detail. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
      • s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        Notably, the lead author on that paper was a visiting researcher at midjourney last year.
    • lambdaone 4mo ago
      This is precisely why you do it in water - the water-skin contact is effectively perfect, as is the water-transducer interface, and the body of water is easily characterizable; in effect you are scanning one large object that consists of a body of water that just happens to have a human body in it, and then extracting the body from that scan.
• rishabhpoddar 4mo ago
  I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!
  • aenvoker 4mo ago
    Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first. I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293
• autoexec 4mo ago
  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.
• uberex 4mo ago
  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.
• OkWing99 4mo ago
  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.
• raincole 4mo ago
  It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.
• ijustlovemath 4mo ago
  [dead]
• frobisher 4mo ago
  we're hitting the hype peak shortly
• bigcat12345678 4mo ago
  https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china Remind me of this, radar based.
• captainbland 4mo ago
  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.
  • ninjalanternshk 4mo ago
    The spa approach also achieves what’s probably the key ingredient to making this useful medically — consistent data over time. We know the “what’s this fuzzy bit!?!” hysteria with elective scans can be counterproductive, but if you truly had monthly scans going back 2 years, the fuzzy bit could in fact mean something.
• zxexz 4mo ago
  slide 28 https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026/2026-BFLY-JPM-Deck-FINAL-1-12-26.pdf https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...
  • i5heu 4mo ago
    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!
• haldujai 4mo ago
  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.
  • intoXbox 4mo ago
    Exactly, try can get a very limited FOV which is probably why they showcased it on arms/legs first
• thih9 4mo ago
  > 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.
• inasio 4mo ago
  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.
• sevenzero 4mo ago
  Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong
• teiferer 4mo ago
  > 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?
  • moozilla 4mo ago
    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.
    • teiferer 4mo ago
      Yeah sure. That's not going to be a sustainable model. Once the tech is available and money is to be made, lots of for-profit alternatives will appear with marketing and lobby budgets that will take over the market. Remember Open AI was a non-profit at some point. Look at how that turned out.
      • aenvoker 4mo ago
        I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.
        • teiferer 4mo ago
          Exactly. With "you" in the original post I didn't mean the exact actor right now but whoever will be in charge eventually. When good actors leave the stage, you are only left with the bad ones.
• atkrista 4mo ago
  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?
  • n2h4 4mo ago
    Only if there's AI involved in some form.
• razorbeamz 4mo ago
  This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.
• keiferski 4mo ago
  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.
  • raindropm 4mo ago
    The pivot to do things they want as AI research lab is perfectly understandable, but also..weird, like their loyal userbase are mostly creative people, and this pivot have ZERO things to do with those audience at all. It also gives a vibe that they gives zero damn about to those creatives audience, or the things that made name for them in the past anymore, or that what I feel as their subscriber... I know that David Holz have his own unique way of doing things but it's still...weird! oh, and the hypetrain on X. yikes..
    • keiferski 4mo ago
      Yeah, exactly. This would have been a cool side project company from the founder and team. Doing it under their main brand is very weird and I don’t quite see how it translates to creatives at all.
    • leothetechguy 4mo ago
      to be fair I wouldn't call people operating AI Image generators creative people. At best they're people curious about the technology itself, anybody willing to learn and do it for the sake of being creative does it themselves.
• albingroen 4mo ago
  What the actual fuck
• arrel 4mo ago
  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.
• armcat 4mo ago
  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.
• dostick 4mo ago
  THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?
• manapause 4mo ago
  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.
• wxw 4mo ago
  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.
• wartywhoa23 4mo ago
  Always trump with the savior card when bad PR¹ starts creeping in. ¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332
• r0ckarong 4mo ago
  They should ask their LLM for fun things to do in prison! Or ask Elizabeth Holmes.
• punnerud 4mo ago
  Why not have 5,6 rings at different levels and do it live in 3D?
• hamburgererror 4mo ago
  > Midjourney Spa Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms
  • schnitzelstoat 4mo ago
    It reminded me more of Blade Runner, especially with the gold lighting.
    • hamburgererror 4mo ago
      I feel confident I can pass the Voight-Kampff test
• cryo32 4mo ago
  Sounds like programmers woke up from a fever dream and decided they can come up with an idea and flesh out the details later.
• otaviogood 4mo ago
  FWIW, I tried the prototype. It's very real. I scanned my hand and arm. It showed realtime images of slices of my hand as I dipped my hand in the water. Really amazing IMO. I think this will be a game changer when it comes out. It's just so easy to scan yourself.
  • shimon 4mo ago
    Did you get any interpretation of the imaging? It sounds cool (I'd take an ultrasound selfie) but it has to be medically useful for something before enough doctors grade enough images to kickstart the data collection for diagnosing more.
• teekert 4mo ago
  A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems. So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants." But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...
  • wkoszek 4mo ago
    If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.
    • teekert 4mo ago
      But what if most "masses" are cysts or other harmless structures that form during the 80 years we're walking around? I think that after about their 3rd useless biopsy people start to feel the problem with this. Of course we can keep tuning and tuning the models, but in the limit it may well make more sense to wait for symptoms. At least that is the current experience. Now maybe this machine will make sense in screening age 55+, 20 year+, 2 pack+ smokers for Lung lesions (where a much large portion of detected lesions are true positives). We do this currently with CT and this may be better or cheaper. But it doesn't look like it is, and it looks like far (very far) lower res than MRI (often the follow-up of a CT-scan).
• lordzelolox 4mo ago
  [dead]
• joduplessis 4mo ago
  This looks remarkably dystopian.
• tec_explorer 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• rarisma 4mo ago
  Welcome back theranos
• rdl 4mo ago
  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.)
  • rasmus1610 4mo ago
    It will be terrible for brain imaging. The ultrasound waves can’t go through the skull and thus can’t image the brain. Additionally you would have to drown the patient since you need a medium other than air between the ultrasound emitting probe and the body which is water in their device. CT is more than sufficient for imaging the brain in a case of trauma and MRI is not automatically better than CT in every case. (I am a neuroradiologist)
• nirui 4mo ago
  I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough. Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth. But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.
  • someothherguyy 4mo ago
    water filtration seems like the easy part
    • laserbeam 4mo ago
      No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.
    • nirui 4mo ago
      Well... they certainly did not show that in the video. Oh and yeah, there are more difficult problem. For example, if the platform moves to lower/lift people in or out the water, some people will probably fail to remain still or even start panic. This might effect the final image. Not sure if Midjourney has way to counter that. Great if they do.
• schmorptron 4mo ago
  I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains. Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)
• dsign 4mo ago
  It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases. The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot. At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire. Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?
• jonplackett 4mo ago
  Are we at peak AI yet? AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up
• deleted 4mo ago
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• Kristencline 4mo ago
  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
  • deanc 4mo ago
    It’s valuable to have input of healthcare professionals here. I don’t disagree with the majority of what you’re saying. However, the value add here is it can do your whole body a lot faster than doing a full body MRI (which would take hours at least?)
• edDavila 4mo ago
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• grego 4mo ago
  I'm sure I read that 30% will be immortal there, but suddenly the blog post changed... :)
• edDavila 4mo ago
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• schnitzelstoat 4mo ago
  > 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.
• internet_points 4mo ago
  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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580255
• trolleski 4mo ago
  AI is about to find out the difference between talking and doing. Exciting!
• lifeisstillgood 4mo ago
  In the early years of X-rays, doctors found all sorts of patients with major organ displacement, and performed surgery to, for example, hold the liver or kidneys “up”. It took a while to realise that textbooks since Leonardos time had drawn and based anatomy on (dead) patients lying on a slab. But X-rays were taken with (alive) patients standing up. So of course there was a lot of “your kidney has slipped!” I fully support and applaud this kind of medical innovation (even if … why midjourney?) but we need to be careful of the medical term VOMIT (victim of modern imaging technology). At some point we need a human doctor to say “calm down, live your life, eat right, exercise right, and accept that somethings don’t need to be panicked over yet - come back in six months”
• dakolli 4mo ago
  They'll get so much money, all the 60 year old billionaires in SF are so desperate not to die.
• alexcpn 4mo ago
  After reading this first, it looked almost like a joke, like how Google used to do Google- TISP Toilet Internet Service Provider https://archive.google/tisp/install.html https://archive.google/tisp/install.html Even now without Xrays it is very hard to really even see if there are blocks in your artery usuing ultrasound (Echocardiography alone). Ultrasound is used indirectly by measuring blood flow difference between stress and rest - not a spa session anyway. Looks like a prank really
  • andrerath 4mo ago
    3D Ultrasound helps a lot in this regard. Getting flow velocity out and tissue motion is very possible if you can support the data rates (in my group we've had some luck getting coronary artery 3D flow out using 3D ultrasound probes). The issue is that 2D ultrasound and flow is an unsolvable problem, so you really do need all 3 dimensions here.
• yanis_t 4mo ago
  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.
• zx8080 4mo ago
  Thank you very much, Midjourney. If some of my doctors were software engineers I probably would be dead by now. Or mid-dead.
• niteshpant 4mo ago
  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
• pera 4mo ago
  > 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)
• tomasGiden 4mo ago
  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.
• Ameo 4mo ago
  Hell yeah, my AI image generation company is now running an alternative medicine AI MRI-alternative imagine spa. Hell yeah.
• alkyon 4mo ago
  We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.
• ChildOfChaos 4mo ago
  Well that's certainly an interesting pivot, when Midjourney where set to announce hardware, who predicted this?
• deleted 4mo ago
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• ali_m 4mo ago
  This is surely trolling? "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" has quite the acronym..
• macleginn 4mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography?
• nelox 4mo ago
  Who needs a head anyway?
• alpineman 4mo ago
  Great, a hallucinated output that only the super wealthy can afford, only to waste doctors' time with the need to run every test again at huge expense. Can we not leave medicine to the professionals? Creating a ghibli rip-off is not the same as diagnosing cancer.
  • ixaxaar 4mo ago
    Well healthcare needs its own DLSS 5!
    • alpineman 4mo ago
      I would just add that my wife is a doctor and in the age of AI it's truly unbearable. In addition to super long hours and stress they now have to deal with patients coming and thinking they know better than people who spent more than a decade in education because of what some chatbot told them.
• laserbeam 4mo ago
  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.
• vrganj 4mo ago
  So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something. The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?
• Jabbles 4mo ago
  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.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• harrouet 4mo ago
  I have seen AI projects to convert a tomography into actual 3D models. Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.
  • rasmus1610 4mo ago
    we don't even need AI for that: https://3dqlab.stanford.edu/what-is-volume-rendering/ https://3dqlab.stanford.edu/what-is-volume-rendering/
  • mirthflat83 4mo ago
    We had this for a long time
• perks_12 4mo ago
  i want a full body scan from the friendly discord app.
• sagarpatil 4mo ago
  1) what?
• iDon 4mo ago
  > ... It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. > ... Together they act as both a choir and an audience I think I'm not the target audience. I guess they are going to need to sign up a lot of people, to train on their scans + their medical outcomes. So the article is talking to people who will get enthused by it, which is more difficult after the question of 23AndMe data sale.
  • JackFr 4mo ago
    I’m a weirdo who vaguely enjoys my MRIs. I’m moderately claustrophobic, but they still don’t really bother me. And I love the warming feeling that makes me feel like I’m getting microwaved.
    • IAmGraydon 4mo ago
      What warming feeling? An MRI shouldn't really make you feel warm unless they're pushing IV contrast.
      • JackFr 4mo ago
        My understanding was that your body was absorbing some amount of whatever electromagnetic stuff passes through you for the image. And the techs have told me it’s nothing to worry about.
        • rogerrogerr 4mo ago
          MRIs are so much cooler than that. https://www.radcommons.org/residents/files/physics/MRI_Made_Easy.pdf https://www.radcommons.org/residents/files/physics/MRI_Made_... is a good read.
      • cromka 4mo ago
        You can definitely feel it in your body, I mean you have metals in you. I definitely feel tingling and general sense of something nearly touching my skin and insides.
• Ono-Sendai 4mo ago
  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.
• Topfi 4mo ago
  This is very concerning: > Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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. Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated. I have questions in general. Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous. Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought. Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.
• GTP 4mo ago
  I 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.
  • MPSimmons 4mo ago
    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.
    • fastasucan 4mo ago
      This backpressure is even with cheaper devices such as x-rays etc.
      • jon-wood 4mo ago
        The backpressure on x-rays is because dosing yourself with radiation on a regular basis is a really great way to generate health problems in the course of trying to find some. There's a reason x-ray operators and anyone in the room with the patient get given lead lined aprons to wear while the machine is active.
  • aeonik 4mo ago
    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.
• AbstractH24 4mo ago
  April fools 2027 is gonna be nuts We live in an era where the daily news stories are so crazy topping them is going to take some creativity
• shireboy 4mo ago
  I have thought that extremely accessible, portable, non-radiation imaging would be revolutionary. Imagine every doctor - or even every person - had a handheld thing they could wave over your affected area to get a high res 3d image of the issue. Of course we have mri, xray, and ultrasound, but those are big and expensive. Obviously there are engineering reasons that is the case, but It seems like a concerted effort to make imaging more portable and accessible, coupled with ai to help analyze could bring about all sorts of follow-on health improvements. Your regular practitioner could check you for heart blockages, clots that lead to stroke, cancers etc as a matter of course. I’m not sure stepping into a golden vat of water is what I have in mind but medical imaging does seem like a possible area for drastic innovation.
  • UltraSane 4mo ago
    Actually doctors tend to frown on people getting full body MRI scans with no symptoms because they tend to cause many false positives.These false positives often trigger a stressful cascade of unnecessary follow-up imaging, bloodwork, and invasive biopsies.
• IshKebab 4mo ago
  I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though?? Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI. The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.
• tmhrtly 4mo ago
  > 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. This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.
  • sobiolite 4mo ago
    Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not. Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
    • jappgar 4mo ago
      Today only I'll sell you 6GB of data for 6000USD its a steal. Buy now.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • jermaustin1 4mo ago
      > Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late. In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it. As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment). What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege. Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
• kamma4434 4mo ago
  Medical Doctors: scans on healthy patients are not a good idea Tech bros: hold my beer…
• Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
  Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes. I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators. It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself. There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.
• hermannj314 4mo ago
  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.
• neuroelectron 4mo ago
  So this is the purpose of building the backroom pools
• owenthejumper 4mo ago
  Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school. Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator, if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infinite amounts of variations in human bodies, which means even the best models focus only on segmenting known organs, and leave anything unknown alone.
  • khafra 4mo ago
    In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy. It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.
    • saghm 4mo ago
      It's not unreasonable to think that the level of acceptable risk for "the language model parsed my text wrong" is in average much higher than "the medical model misdiagnosed my condition". You can probably come up with scenarios where a language model behaving unexpectedly would have drastic consequences if you imagine them hooked up to automatic systems where they have immediate control over actions that can't easily be reversed, but like, that's why it's a bad idea to use them like that, and they're the exception rather than the rule. It seems plausible that scenarios like that for medical models are a lot closer to the norm than the exception, in which case the tolerance we have for them "filling in the gaps" incorrectly would need to be much smaller.
      • spongebobstoes 4mo ago
        this doesn't need to be a diagnostic model, just a data source for existing doctors
• wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
  HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.
• meindnoch 4mo ago
  Theranos 2.0?
• randusername 4mo ago
  > Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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. This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop. You have to hire an army of expensive compliance people (cheap ones aren't nimble enough for startups), develop the whole thing start to finish under strict design controls, and usually throw a lot of time and capital into convincing regulators your very innovative and disruptive new R&D endeavor is actually derivative enough to draft behind some existing medical device.
  • spongebobstoes 4mo ago
    do they need FDA approval to have a good impact? it doesn't need to be a licensed medical device for me to interpret the data, and then verbally tell my doctor what's wrong this is similar to how people get a lot of medical value out of chatgpt today
    • Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
      It needs approval from someone to ensure it's safe first and foremost - health & safety inspections, hygiene, FCC approval, etc. And FDA approval (I presume) if they want to give formal diagnoses, but I believe that if they don't get that it'll fall under the "alternative medicine" umbrella, which is very broad. But they can do whatever under that umbrella as long as it's safe.
    • StarlaAtNight 4mo ago
      I wonder how doctors feel about people consulting ChatGPT. I know a doctor who can't stand people getting medical advice from quacks on TikTok, but that's probably a different problem/pattern
      • singpolyma3 4mo ago
        Since they hated Google I'm sure they also hate chatgpt. Mostly they hate patients who have opinions
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• Brosper 4mo ago
  They will do everything but not release the API
• post-it 4mo ago
  So it's what, computational ultrasound? Why are they making it sound so much like they're going to steal my kidneys?
• angoragoats 4mo ago
  What the hell is wrong with companies these days? > you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.
• Applejinx 4mo ago
  This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology. Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.
• Yokohiii 4mo ago
  Interesting choice to draw "inspiration" from the chambers of Niander Wallace, the main antagonist in Blade Runner 2049. https://architectureofsilence.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/architecture-of-wallace-tower/ https://architectureofsilence.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/archi...
• elAhmo 4mo ago
  Not sure why people keep posting links to X videos when they are available from at the official announcement post: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost World's first trillionaire doesn't need more money or influence in destroying people lives, let's do a small step at a time and not use X.
• jmhmd 4mo ago
  Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist: - This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo. - They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true "full body" in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that's why we use CT for lung screening!) - The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite - small, deep structures. - "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians, but I in general have no problem with people collecting data on themselves where they can. To me it's similar to heart rate monitors or home blood pressure cuffs. The main issue here is education, so that patients know what the data is and is not telling them. The more complex the data, the more difficult that is. - Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that "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", I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.
  • nixie 4mo ago
    Couldn't have said it better.
• tedggh 4mo ago
  This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it
• sltr 4mo ago
  "when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging
  • dmd 4mo ago
    Counterpoint: When you're not looking for things, you don't find them. Which is why the current US administration is destroying any kind of science that might find, say, climate change, or emerging pandemics.
• andai 4mo ago
  Super cool. Reminds me of Mary Lou Jepsen's (who did One Laptop Per Child) company Openwater, which is using some kinda infrared holography, also as an alternative to MRIs. Supposedly they can be made lightweight and wearable. https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_light_to_see_deep_inside_our_bodies_and_brains https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen#Openwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen#Openwater
• barretts 4mo ago
  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.
• bawana 4mo ago
  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/
• u8 4mo ago
  I won't have an opinion until Brian Johnson tells me how much younger this makes him.
• cseleborg 4mo ago
  > You want as much data as you can get about your health The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided. 1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc. 2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.
• dwa3592 4mo ago
  > 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.
• SpyCoder77 4mo ago
  There is no way I am letting an AI image generator take scans of my naked body
• Mitsuwa 4mo ago
  I thought this was a satire at first
• addozhang 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• danso 4mo ago
  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.
• wyck 4mo ago
  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?
  • lukeinator42 4mo ago
    I think the scanner outputs petabytes of raw data that then get processed down into images, so you would only need to store an image per slice ideally, kinda like MRI DICOM files.
• tbryant 4mo ago
  Yesssssss, AI overlords put me in your dolphin technology powered human deep fryer.
• freeplay 4mo ago
  Elysium is playing out right before our eyes
• tehjoker 4mo ago
  This is like the plot of the movie Elysium
• thomastraum 4mo ago
  they call it Promethean Spas... Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver.
• perdomon 4mo ago
  >"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.
  • arrowleaf 4mo ago
    There are huge backlogs of folks for imaging... Radiologists aren't exactly sitting around daydreaming all day waiting for a patient.
  • thaw13579 4mo ago
    They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• aghilmort 4mo ago
  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?
• Cort3z 4mo ago
  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.
• ElijahLynn 4mo ago
  I just cried watching that intro video! It's like, wow, us humans have a new tool to help us be our best! Beautiful!
• dmitrygr 4mo ago
  MRI & CT go from captured data -> displayed image via real provable hard math. This seems to imply that there is an LLM layer involved. Which means hallucinations. No thanks.
• consumer451 4mo ago
  I have zero medical knowledge, but assuming that they go through a good regulatory approval process, why is everyone so negative? These are smart people trying something new. They are bootstrapped. How is that not cool? Isn't this exactly the type of thing that should be exciting?
• thenakulchawla 4mo ago
  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.
• chris_explicare 4mo ago
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