4 ms·

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 enginee

by 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!
    - tomhow 4mo ago
      I guess the key quality of the best humour is that everyone can see the humour in it; at least appreciate the joke even if they didn't agree with the underlying point. At best it makes them rethink what they previously thought about the topic. Much of what is offered as humour online (and also mainstream television) is theatrical rage, which generates laughs and applause (a.k.a. 'clapter') from people who already shared the rage, but to those not already on side it just falls flat. That seems to me what's going on here.
- Jtsummers 4mo ago
  > they have no hope for commercialization. Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.
  - CityOfThrowaway 4mo ago
    This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably
999900000999 4mo ago
Is the idea to use AI magic to detect cancer and other bad things? I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months. Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
- arcticbull 4mo ago
  Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
  - dualvariable 4mo ago
    Timing is also important. I can predict cancer with 100% success, because everyone will get cancer, unless they die of something else first.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
    - arcticbull 4mo ago
      False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population. If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis. If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that. This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful. Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless. In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.

by maz1b 4mo ago

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!
  - tomhow 4mo ago
    I guess the key quality of the best humour is that everyone can see the humour in it; at least appreciate the joke even if they didn't agree with the underlying point. At best it makes them rethink what they previously thought about the topic. Much of what is offered as humour online (and also mainstream television) is theatrical rage, which generates laughs and applause (a.k.a. 'clapter') from people who already shared the rage, but to those not already on side it just falls flat. That seems to me what's going on here.
Jtsummers 4mo ago
> they have no hope for commercialization. Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.
- CityOfThrowaway 4mo ago
  This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably

999900000999 4mo ago

Is the idea to use AI magic to detect cancer and other bad things? I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months. Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.

arcticbull 4mo ago
Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
- dualvariable 4mo ago
  Timing is also important. I can predict cancer with 100% success, because everyone will get cancer, unless they die of something else first.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  False positive rates are extremely important in the medical system as it exists today, where most scans will come without a known baseline and doctors cannot prescribe "biweekly scans for the next 6 weeks to see what changes". If we can achieve the kind of imaging abundance they're imagining (which I don't know how to evaluate based on their short post), I think false positives become much less of an issue, at least in the context of cancer where malignancy is the only problem.
  - arcticbull 4mo ago
    False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population. If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis. If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that. This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful. Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless. In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.