5 ms·
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 g
by 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 agoI 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 agoThis backpressure is even with cheaper devices such as x-rays etc.
- jon-wood 4mo agoThe 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 agoWhy 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.
- GTP 4mo agoI think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.
- fastasucan 4mo agoBecause if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.
- x187463 4mo ago> Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.
- aeonik 4mo agoFor me? If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise. And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors. Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off. I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.
- 4mo ago
- mlrtime 4mo agoAgreed, If you look for issues, you'll find them. Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics). In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).
- telesilla 4mo agoI'm grateful that modern science can monitor and predict such issues, even if in the end there's no problem. The alternative, as we know for thousands of years without modern health care, is far worse for women giving birth. I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too heartbreaking.
- GTP 4mo agoSure, but in this case, there was a good reason for the additional tests: a high-risk pregnancy. And still, the outcome was stress for nothing. Now, imagine thousands of perfectly healthy people doing full-body scans every week just because they can. This actually carries the risk of jamming real health care, because those perfectly healthy people will undergo additional clinical tests for nothing.
- telesilla 4mo agoImagine all the data that gets us towards those scans actually being meaningful. Don't treat them like scans to find problems but scans to learn from, collectively.
- GTP 4mo agoAs I wrote in replies to other similar comments, this would be the case if this technology was presented as an opportunity for researchers to run more large-scale studies. This isn't however the case, it is instead presented as a shiny toy for fancy spas.
- thebruce87m 4mo ago> chances are that the scan will show something unusual Something unusual in a single one-off scan vs something unusual and changing over the course of multiple scans give two different views.
- Saline9515 4mo agoThe main potential of this technology is that it's easy and fast, unlike classic MRIs. So someone could do a scan a month without a problem.
- zipy124 4mo agoMedLifeCrisis the youtube channel has a great video [1] on why you shouldn't full body scan. He's a consultant (highest level of doctor) in the NHS in England (and has done a PhD and research as is common in the UK medical system). [1]: https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8 https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8
- bondarchuk 4mo agoI know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.
- andrerath 4mo agoSOTA ultrasound devices are still very expensive, with e.g. a custom 3D probe with a few hundred piezo elements costing well over 10k. IF they want to use MEMS probe instead of piezo (which is implied by them saying that they will use a chirp), that's going to be even more expensive, considering the lack of manufacturing know-how. When sufficiently scaled, I wouldn't say it is an exorbitant price for large research hospitals, but I am a little skeptical of rolling these out as a health checkup "spa" service outside of areas with extreme wealth concentration (e.g., Silicon Valley? Sure. London? Yeah; Minneapolis? not so sure.)
- evrydayhustling 4mo ago"We shouldn't collect information because we don't know how to fit it into our care playbook" might be rational for a single patient, but it's a policy that will lock you into your current playbook. Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good. I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.
- GTP 4mo agoI understand your point, and I might even agree to some extent. However, the issue is that this isn't presented as an opportunity to do research, but as commoditizing a clinical test that, when it isn't done for medical reasons (i.e., investigating some existing symptoms), can lead to a lot of false positives.
- mapkkk 4mo agoThis is exactly why it's a bad idea. I agree that if this technology comes to fruition, it should be in every clinical and research setting as a tool for us to further our understanding. It shouldn't be a commodified test anyone can do at any time they feel like it. There are so many examples this leading to over or misdiagnosing already. I've seen patients who thought they had diabetes because they got a CGM over the counter and it showed a blood sugar spike during exercise (as in, their body doing exactly what it was supposed to do). He also now avoids oatmeal because "it spikes my blood sugar". Surprise: reddit and tiktok are awash with such stories as well. I've seen a patient who on a whim decided to get 24hr blood pressure monitoring done, and thought they have severe hypertension because their systolic reached 170 when they were climbing stairs and during a football match because they were cheering and shouting. In a similar vein, there are shady practicians who offer full body MRI scans, and fMRI brain scans to the well-to-do as a way of diagnosing things, when in fact neither are specific enough to actually diagnose something on their own. 23andme tests sending patients into clinics because they found a specific SNP that may be associated with worse outcomes for a disease. We have neither the resources nor a specific enough technology (scan shows something: not specific enough to tell us what it is, but it sure is something) to unleash these for the general population to use.
- khafra 4mo agoIf this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?
- jappgar 4mo agoAnother reason is that we don't actually know what negative effects regular "scans" might have. Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.
- pigpop 4mo agoAs crude as it sounds, you don't know until you try.
- igortg 4mo agoI thought the same. There are papers analyzing data about that. https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-2/blog-post-title-two-csz4x https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-... > As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
- spongebobstoes 4mo agothose scans are one-off events, these scans are regular the signal is improved by focusing on differences over time, instead of looking for insight from a single snapshot in a production system, I look at the change log around incident start as one high signal way to diagnose the problem I want the same ability with my own body. new pain? look for recent scan deltas, in conjunction with modern medical intuition
- heironimus 4mo agoWe already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things. Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same? “Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path. Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.
- TuringNYC 4mo ago>> But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!
- dperfect 4mo agoOverdiagnosis can be a problem. On the flip side, I wonder if adding the time dimension to the data (i.e., you could realistically have scans from every few weeks over the course of years) could significantly change that. Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns. Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.
- wj 4mo agoThis seems like something MLB teams would install in their locker rooms if it works.
- pigpop 4mo agoI agree, hopefully it becomes just like any other cheap and easy measurement like blood pressure. Most of the time, small changes and variations will be determined to be normal but having a record and a measurement allows you to determine what is abnormal or a symptom of a disease. It's the difference between having a measurement and having nothing at all (if you never got a scan with CT or MRI).