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").
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.
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
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.
> 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.
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.
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
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.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
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.
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.
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.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
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)?
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.
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!
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
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!
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")
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
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.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
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.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
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.
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.
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
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?
> 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.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> 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?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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
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.
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").
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
I'm not putting my head under. How do we know this won't cause aneurysms? Damage eyes and ears? Getting a medical device approved takes time because of concerns like this.
AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.
What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.
The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)
that's not a video render of a hypothetical device, that's a real video of the real working device, fwiw
It's just a render? Where's the video?
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.
The first video has the actual device (whether it's functioning or not) and the second video is a render.
> 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.
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.
> it's _git gud_
There are physical limits to detection and technical parameters that make some situations indeterminate even for the best of the 'gud'. It is frustrating that, hearing an argument from many different individuals over a long time, you assume that each speaker is missing the critical insight that you possess.
> but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans? There is no 'large data dump' personalized to you except for your own imaging.
> if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it
The doctor isn't the problem, it's the people who would be seeking out monthly imaging without symptoms
I go to the doctor every year for a checkup without symptoms. Why a year? Why not every six months? Two weeks? Day?
If the false positive rate is demonstrably low, I can't see the risk. People who think they need a doctor will go to a doctor with or without a fancy scan. People who want to play armchair physician will play armchair physician with or without a fancy scan.
How do you get the false positive rate low? There's a lot of things that look weird on a scan that turn out to be benign. And if you tell patients "well the chance this turns into a serious disease or cancer is low but you can get this optional procedure to fix it now if you want" how many do you think will take them up on it?
A new chargeable procedure is for for the hospital but maybe not for patients imo.
You can get scans without your normal doctor recommending them. The point is that there is evidence that scans obtained ‘just because’ are harmful as they lead to unnecessary procedures at the population level
I have libertarian enough tendencies to think that if a person wants to self-operate, or pay for an operation that doctors are telling them is not justified given the evidence, then they should have right to do it. But I don't think that's what people normally mean when they say that eager screening causes harmful overdiagnosis.
> So your suggestion for indeterminate scans is more scans?
The solution to imperfect evidence is consistent and calibrated risk estimation of both disease and intervention.
The risk estimation is why people aren’t recommended to get scans! There are studies on ‘VIPs’ who get ‘executive MRIs’ and wind up getting treated for things that would never have justified intervention.
exactly correct. if a bit of knowledge is dangerous, the correct response is not to choose ignorance, it is to get more knowledge about what dangers arise and problemsolve some more there. run it out a few hundred years and it is then no longer dangerous, and strictly better than ignorance.
That's not how the legal system works, though.
If Midjourney says "maybe you have cancer" but your doctor doesn't take it seriously, you might sue if you do end up with cancer. You might even win, regardless of whether "wait and see" was the right approach.
Meanwhile, if your doctor gives you an unnecessary CT scan that rules out cancer, hospital both earns $$$ and the doctor doesn't face legal consequences. Your increased chance of cancer risk from the radiation isn't something you can realistically sue over.
This is fair, but I think it's better stated as you did than couched in language suggesting it's a matter of principle.
> The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
If the scans are cheap and fast enough, the solution is to not do anything until you’ve observed the mass in question grow over time, not just be there.
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.
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.
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
https://voices.uchicago.edu/pearsonlab/
Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
Timing is also important. I can predict cancer with 100% success, because everyone will get cancer, unless they die of something else first.
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.
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
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.
As a person experiencing UV sensitive skin, I’ve had multiple wheel-spin biopsies which turned out benign as expected, and at least once a year I find a weird looking spot I have take pictures of and promise to monitor for a bit. I don’t think there’s any reason this kind of stuff couldn’t be extended to other cancers if non-invasive next steps were available.
Fair point. Definitely not a replacement; it’s meant to bridge the data gap.
Honestly if these bozos can't even write one first sentence that says what the FUCK this is, they have no hope for commercialization.
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)?
> 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.
This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably
This made me spit my coffee out! Thanks for helping me start my day with a laugh. No comment otherwise :-P
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!
It seems like the radiology equivalent to a blood testing machine that could be deployed to walgreens and detect 100 diseases with a finger prick.
True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.
So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.
But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors
Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.
what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.
Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.
In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.
I have a cheap bridge to sell you
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-...
Exactly. Don’t even try to get into medical imaging until you’ve made a heap of cash off a Discord waifu image bot
Let's see what you've built.
Made some bomb spam musubi earlier, thinking about a neutrino detector for the home now
Classic.
Let the doers do.
If that’s your criteria, wait till you hear this way more successful guy’s pitch for data centers in space!
If that’s your thinking, I’m sorry but you’re just a sucker.
Grifters love you.
Totally agree.
This community can be much better than that.
They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd.
Is this some AI hallucination post?
My thoughts exactly. Some openclaw got loose.
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!
Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.
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")
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
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.
is ultrasonic scanning completely harmless for developing baby? when my wife was pregnant, I remember they wouldn't recommend too frequent ultrasonic scans...
radiologist here - example images don't look great
I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
> I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this
Never underestimate the audacity of a software engineer with a new toy
> It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Well, if you replace LeBron with Jordan, and Bowling with Baseball ..
Not sure. Image reconstruction/generation is a computationally intensive process, and in recent years DL based methods for improve image reconstruction have advanced fields like musculoskeletal MRI imaging. The physics behind this idea are interesting, but will have to wait to see if they produce images with high anatomic detail.
I'm pretty sure, like most things, it's better to wait and see what's built rather than take issue with their short marketing video.
I mean, Michael Jordan did play for the White Sox for a hot second
It’s because no one has heard from mid journey in a few years so they’re pivoting
can you say more? dont look great compared to current radiology, sure, but you see no potential in ultrasound diagnosis whatsoever? would it improving 10% change your mind? 10x? what's a good way to think about what "looks good" looks like?
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?
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
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
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.
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/
Besides the high probably that those images are fake, and probably this entire device is fake... if it were real then it would mean what they're showing in those images is not even close to an approximation of what the actual data could show you if they put more effort into volume rendering of 3D data (not unlike Voreen).
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
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
This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.
So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?
https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Are you implying soundwaves are dangerous?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it's the healthcare industry's fault, they're brainwashing me into not getting more procedures. Sounds very plausible.
Because a lot of the hatred for AI is just hysteria.
Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice
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.
"What possible use could there be for doing this?"
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
There's a world of difference between the health checkups we get in Japan, and something like a full-body MRI/CT.
You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.
Are you joking? 人間ドック is absolutely more than a "health checkup". Maybe do some reading: https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
That is not the same as the annual mandatory health check.
Maybe your employer pays for you to get a more comprehensive checkup by default and you're unaware of this?
But the ones vast majority of population here gets do not include MRI or CT or Endoscopy.
And, _even then_; specific checkups when you're looking for _specific things_ are still very different things than a full-body MRIs.
I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.
I don't read the parent comment to take issue with the use case per se but the billion scans per month figure.
Surely, whatever this is giving you, getting a scan once a month must be plenty. They need a billion people to get a scan every month.
Because false positives have a tremendous emotional (and, depending on your healthcare system, also monetary) cost to patients.
because it has negative effects. Over scanning leads to, in particular with the economic incentives of the healthcare system at large not to mention a company like this, over-treatment. It's one of the reasons countries have scaled back mammograms because women have been forced into surgery and treatment with no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Prostate cancer being another one.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
>that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
So if you sent every American through body scanners, which are less reliable than that test btw, you'd have quite literally millions of people in follow up procedures for diseases they do not have with their mental health ruined and the system ground to a halt, because producing information is not always the right thing to do.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
Theoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.
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.
The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones.
On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
False positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
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?
> 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.
> your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
Um, that's still a tumor.
Yeah but it's not cancer.
Ultrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!).
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
There's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
I would guess build a health prediction model. Instead of next text token or next frame in a video, how about next 12 months or years of body health?
Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.
Who reads these scans and who assume liabilities for missed reads?
AI[no one]. The customer.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.
Lol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath.
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
The top 100,000 families taking this scan every day would still put them 2 magnitudes below the target.
A Ferarri can do 200mph, but almost never does. Rolex watches come with helium valves, not that anyone understands what they are for let alone uses them. Luxury goods are always about untapped capacity.
What? This comment chain is specifically about the target of a billion full-body scans a month using 50,000 units.
That's about 1 scan per unit, every 2 minutes, 24/7.
It's really not OK to victimize the rich like this either.
Rich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
Isn't therapy or enlightenment ultimately cheaper?
Hot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few).
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
I can’t tell if this is serious or a top tier joke.
Poor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
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.
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?
Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?
Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.
So if it works: Awesome.
The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
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.
I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?
is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image
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.
> 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
Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...
Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?
Great point. Scanning healthy people is one thing, people who truly need help (like myself) is another!
This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.
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.
So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?
Sounds good to me.
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?
Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.
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.
Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality
If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market
> "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"
FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.
They made the opening credits from Westward.
Congrats!
Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?
Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.
Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?
MRI uses EM radiation in the radiowave frequency band. This is using sound.
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
Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?
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
Is this company public? Can I short them?
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.
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?
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.
it would suck if Chinese tech advanced medical care faster or made it cheaper.
Being realistic is good
Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.
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
Where is the belly button?!
Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?
Most isn't 3d, it's hand positioned single slices.
Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.
The math does not math
Strong theranos vibes
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
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
But why? It doesn’t say why?
This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!
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.
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?
Surely they have a paper or something on this?
The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?
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.
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.
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.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
> 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?
They founded LeapMotion previously which was pretty big and totally unrelated to AI. They've been doing all sorts of shenanigans it seems
Also fmr cofounder of leap motion, which developed a mouse that didn't you to touch it!
> can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
What do you mean here?
The idea came from LLMs? They built this with LLMs?
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
So the idea is Midjourney uses LLMs as a sounding board and came up with this idea?
You can just build things
“Just building” radiation emitters like CT scanners is a bad idea.
This is ultrasound. You didn’t read the article. It’s perfectly safe.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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
At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.
I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.
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
This is a joke, right?
Yes it's a joke, instead of this project we should wait for officially approved doctors to come up with this in 2060
What reason is there to believe that will happen?
Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.
Presumably you can just hang from above.
I doubt it. Would that not interfere with the scan? I’ve really no idea on the merits of this.
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.