There have been a lot of more thoughtful analyses of the scanner circulating on Twitter that have actually highlighted the real problems with what they’re claiming.

An example of an important point brought up by someone with actual domain expertise is to point out that ultrasound doesn’t travel well through bone or air. Once you realize this, you understand why they chose the slices they picked for their marketing images. Get up toward the rib cage and lungs and ultrasound isn’t going to be doing the magical things they claim.

Even this post hedges with “if it’s high resolution” claims, but we already know what the resolution looks like. You can see the images they’re producing and they’re pretty rough. They’re using sensors from another ultrasound company so it’s not like they made a breakthrough. The concern now is that they’re going to start trying to make up for the limitations of ultrasound by having AI process the images into something that looks more impressive and hides the limitations of the technology.

I don’t know why this particular Tweet is trending, because it doesn’t seem to add anything at all to the conversation. If you spend any time on Twitter this feels like template engagement bait designed to ride a popular topic without adding anything to the conversation.

The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.

And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."

1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.

2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.

In general, I think we should applaud this though.

Any genuine attempt to create novel medical technologies is probably a good thing (assuming they’re non-invasive and non-painful).

Unless it’s a Theranos situation, I think it’s a great thing to attempt, even if it fails. So many things we rely on today are the result of a successful attempt, but the failures were just as necessary for the eventual success.

That ambition is very positive to me.

The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad including risky biopsies. Some have gone so far as to literally state early detection does not lead to better outcomes (simply not true - genuine early detection is very helpful but what they mean is it is outweighed at the population level by false positives).

The counter argument is that more information is always good but that you must learn to handle the noise, and we should focus on improving how we handle false positives. Including, but not limited to more frequent and abundant scans of various types.

The reason this is trending is because it both includes the argument and feels nice that someone changes their mind.

Personally, I think a lot of the issues here come down to the fact that we lie about the statistics instead of just show them. A test is neither positive or negative. It’s x% updated probability that you have something.

> And overall, the side effects from all the risky, invasive procedures to track down the over 90% of stuff that was harmless equal or outweigh the benefit from removing the less than 10% of stuff that wasn't harmless.

I accept this (well-used) perspective from a practical, current perspective, but not for abstract diagnostics generally. From the Bayes' theorem, and same logic you use in Kalman filters: More knowledge, if you have data on the confidence, always helps. It only causes these negative outcomes due to acting poorly with the data (e.g. due to emotions and liability concerns, I suspect here)

the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat

- imaging that can get down to the cellular level easily and often.

- the ability to process that imaging data to find issues effectively.

- the ability to act on that data in a minimally invasive way.

This is a step in the right direction for one and two and the third has had progress too by others. We aren't there yet, but I can see a future where individual cells are treated and at that point all sorts of things are possible.

https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h...