I’m seeing a lot of excited posts on twitter about this but I’m inherently extremely sceptical of an image model company pivoting to medical technology.
I’m also quite sceptical of the concept of easily available full-body scanning, at least for the near future, given it could seemingly lead to a lot of unnecessary medical treatment based on benign abnormalities.
ultrasound is awful to work with in traditional medical image processing technologies and pretty darn bad in 2015-2025 convolutional medical imaging ai technologies. Magnetic Resonance is so much better when its the right tool for the job that replacing it with ultrasound for cost reasons is a tarpit. There are cases where ultrasound is better but these center on leveraging an extremely talented operator who is manipulating the probe manually, which you lose in any of these bath based approaches. I’d be surprised if this goes anywhere.
Credentials: I have beaten ultrasound with the ML stick until it yielded a few times ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=O1xhOlUAAAAJ ) it was terrible and I have lasting resentment toward an imaging modality, though great fondness for all my colaborators. Many failed projects that did not make the google acholar
jmhmd: Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:
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They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true “full body” in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that’s why we use CT for lung screening!)
The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite—small, deep structures.
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Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that “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”, I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.
IshKebab: I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea.
Also there’s absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle.
I think the narrative among the SF AI crowd has escaped its basis in the medical facts, so I want to throw a bit of cold water on it. I’m a psychiatrist, which is about as far as you can get from radiology while still being a doctor, so this is speculation only, and you can ignore it if you find an actual radiologist or ultrasonographer with opinions. Still, my take is that this scanner isn’t useful for most current serious medical applications. It could potentially be used to pioneer a new class of low-risk screening applications, but it’s unclear whether these are good, and depends a lot on what other future technology gets invented in parallel.
Why can’t this immediately replace existing medical image modalities like normal ultrasound, CT, or MRI?
Ultrasound is great, but it can’t penetrate bone or air. Many things doctors want to look at involve bone or air in some way.
Couldn’t this technology enable new, non-specific-diagnostic uses for healthy people?
why don’t people get yearly whole-body MRI screenings? Some people do—companies like this provide them, and some rich people who can pay $2,000 out of pocket consume them. But the medical consensus currently recommends against them because they’re more likely to produce dangerous false positives than helpful true positives, and studies have failed to demonstrate benefit.
Couldn’t this technology become more useful in the future?
Yes. I think the best way to think of this is as a bet that future technology develops in a way that allows new possibilities for diagnostic ultrasound—or, even better, an attempt to gather the training data / interest / investment that will make this happen.
The responses from real radiologists were universally negative. Here are some examples: (screenshots are annoying to embed please go to the blog)
The trivial reason is that due to the limitations of physics ultrasound will always be less capable at resolving anatomy than MRI or x-ray-based methods that we already have
Does anyone with a medical/engineering background have any thoughts on Midjourney’s new “Midjourney Scanner”?
https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
I’m seeing a lot of excited posts on twitter about this but I’m inherently extremely sceptical of an image model company pivoting to medical technology.
I’m also quite sceptical of the concept of easily available full-body scanning, at least for the near future, given it could seemingly lead to a lot of unnecessary medical treatment based on benign abnormalities.
ultrasound is awful to work with in traditional medical image processing technologies and pretty darn bad in 2015-2025 convolutional medical imaging ai technologies. Magnetic Resonance is so much better when its the right tool for the job that replacing it with ultrasound for cost reasons is a tarpit. There are cases where ultrasound is better but these center on leveraging an extremely talented operator who is manipulating the probe manually, which you lose in any of these bath based approaches. I’d be surprised if this goes anywhere.
Credentials: I have beaten ultrasound with the ML stick until it yielded a few times ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=O1xhOlUAAAAJ ) it was terrible and I have lasting resentment toward an imaging modality, though great fondness for all my colaborators. Many failed projects that did not make the google acholar
I don’t, but here are other people’s thoughts.
Midjourney Medical | Hacker News
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney + his twitter thread