3 ms·

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

• 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
      Yes, it's the healthcare industry's fault, they're brainwashing me into not getting more procedures. Sounds very plausible.
      • nihonde 4mo ago
        Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.
        • hawkice 4mo ago
          Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would be justified. Chemo is a life saver when it's saving lives -- if the alternative is no symptoms, it just ruins your life for a profoundly uncertain upside.
          • roarcher 4mo ago
            If you seriously think this is a realistic scenario, you should call your doctor and tell him you've decided you have cancer and would like to order chemotherapy. See what he says. Nobody is deciding for themselves to do chemo because they think something looks funny on a scan. All the scan gives them is a reason to talk to their doctor, who will do all the usual due diligence before deciding on treatment, if any. And on the flip side, I hear stories all the time of people who DO have symptoms but they get dismissed by their doctor as stress or food allergies or whatever until it's too late. Maybe if patients were armed with a scan that shows a mass at the site of their abdominal pain, there would be fewer of these horror stories.
            • tptacek 4mo ago
  • throwawayben 4mo ago
    couldn't it be different when scanning becomes very cheap and quick and it's the delta over n scans that gives signal?
• nonethewiser 4mo ago
  Because a lot of the hatred for AI is just hysteria.
• ajyoon 4mo ago
  People are responding negatively to what looks very much like vaporware from a company stepping way outside its domain into medical imaging with a bizarrely positioned announcement post. Medical imaging is a very active field of research with many brilliant minds working on it. If this were truly an MRI killer, they would not be announcing it as a spa.
  • jdw64 4mo ago
    When I think of 'YAMAHA's case, I believe they can fully realize their own ideas. These people are mainly experts in image-related fields, right? And we're talking about image AI—which, in practice, needs to recognize the characteristics of objects—so it seems to me that it's a fairly relevant field. But since you're more of an expert than I am, your opinion probably carries more weight.
  • jdw64 4mo ago
    After reading to what you said and thinking about it seriously, I do think there were some parts that were too unrealistic. I considered a few things, such as whether the cost of data transmission during streaming, that is, the cost of constructing an entire human body from this single slice, is actually reasonable. Thanks for your comment.