I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."
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."
>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.
yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.
when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.
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.
Buried in tlb's response might be the J-curve, the S-Curve (=integral of J-Curve), the hype curve, and finally Braess/Jevon/Baumol: why is healthcare inflationary if it is so helpful and so needed. The tension between helpfulness and perceived necessity must be explored, ceterum censeo (3.)
> But the only way to find out was to have invasive, risky procedures to biopsy or remove what was found.
> 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)
There’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.
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.
...and this is why people fall for it. Every. Single. Time.
Literally everything they're saying is marketingslop gobbledegook. No studies, no papers, no doctors; just "500k transducers," and "30fps!" Anyone can wire that up. With a little cash, you might even be able to stream, record, and proccess it. Still means absolute diddly squat if you haven't compared it to other imaging or figured out how to train a radiologist to use it effectively or done trials for specific diagnostics or diseases.
They'll figure out if it does anything other than show you an animated cartoon xray of yourself later. After they have your money.
That is a pretty wild disparagement this early. A Theranos situation is one where fraud has been committed. Theranos itself would not have been a "Theranos situation" if, after making initial bold claims ("we're gonna do a full blood panel with a drop of your blood"), they had tried to make it work, failed, and then been upfront about that. But they committed fraud and the rest is history.
With regards to Midjourney Scanner, you have no evidence that any fraud is happening or is likely to happen with this device. AFAIK they haven't actually made strong claims about what this will be capable of in a medical context, so fraud would be quite hard at this stage anyway. As such, it seems unreasonable to expect them to already have done studies with doctors.
You can't compare it to other imaging technologies, train radiologists on it, or do trials for specific diagnostics until you've wired it up and built the device. If you demand that you do that before building the thing you can literally never create anything new.
A theranos situation is one where you're lying about what you have reason to believe the new device will do - saying it will do things that you have no reason to think are even plausible - that you have prototypes doing the thing even. Not one where you're merely experimenting with something new that might or might not pan out.
Thanks to the Zio patch I was finally able to convince doctors I actually had a heart condition that I had been telling them I had for years. For about a decade they were telling me my irregular rhythm was due to anxiety.
Which of those is groundbreaking? The Butterly handheld ultrasound is old technology in a new form factor with a bunch of trade offs. Useful in some situations, sure, but “groundbreaking”? Same with the Swoop portable MRI: existing technology, different form factor, big trade offs.
You’ve pretty much demonstrated the criticism is true, that all these grandiose claims made by VC backed medical device companies are… bunk. They made something smaller and shittier, yay?
actually i think the chatbot you consulted listed a bunch of stuff that is a pretty bad example of VC (deep capital markets) leading biotech innovation. Shockwave is a good example - HistoSonics is a much better example and was written about on HN. By comparison Intuitive has conclusively discovered that outcomes are more or less the same as non-teleoperated laparoscopic procedures, at least ones common enough to do a comparison.
I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutions
one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat
MidJourney has better style than most other image generators, especially for artistic images.
Unfortunately it hasn't kept up on image quality, detail, or text rendering. I think this is because they don't have the $ to keep up in the scaling game.
I'm not a doctor but (Isn't there always a but after someone saying they aren't a doctor?) it seems to me we need three things to bring in a true revolution:
- 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.
Given the incentives (an ai booster account who is also prompting chat to write his posts) does this even belong on HN? I feel like our standards have dropped so much in the last two years.
I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."
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."
>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.
yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.
when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.
2 things:
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.
>Rather, helpful tests become convenient
Buried in tlb's response might be the J-curve, the S-Curve (=integral of J-Curve), the hype curve, and finally Braess/Jevon/Baumol: why is healthcare inflationary if it is so helpful and so needed. The tension between helpfulness and perceived necessity must be explored, ceterum censeo (3.)
https://xcancel.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2068434810872496453#m
> But the only way to find out was to have invasive, risky procedures to biopsy or remove what was found.
> 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 most practical Bayesian counter (indep of matters of confidence) might be the info bottleneck:
The risk (bottleneck) is in throwing out the relevant detailsThere’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.
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.
It's a Theranos situation.
>>That ambition is very positive to me.
...and this is why people fall for it. Every. Single. Time.
Literally everything they're saying is marketingslop gobbledegook. No studies, no papers, no doctors; just "500k transducers," and "30fps!" Anyone can wire that up. With a little cash, you might even be able to stream, record, and proccess it. Still means absolute diddly squat if you haven't compared it to other imaging or figured out how to train a radiologist to use it effectively or done trials for specific diagnostics or diseases.
They'll figure out if it does anything other than show you an animated cartoon xray of yourself later. After they have your money.
That is a pretty wild disparagement this early. A Theranos situation is one where fraud has been committed. Theranos itself would not have been a "Theranos situation" if, after making initial bold claims ("we're gonna do a full blood panel with a drop of your blood"), they had tried to make it work, failed, and then been upfront about that. But they committed fraud and the rest is history.
With regards to Midjourney Scanner, you have no evidence that any fraud is happening or is likely to happen with this device. AFAIK they haven't actually made strong claims about what this will be capable of in a medical context, so fraud would be quite hard at this stage anyway. As such, it seems unreasonable to expect them to already have done studies with doctors.
You can't compare it to other imaging technologies, train radiologists on it, or do trials for specific diagnostics until you've wired it up and built the device. If you demand that you do that before building the thing you can literally never create anything new.
A theranos situation is one where you're lying about what you have reason to believe the new device will do - saying it will do things that you have no reason to think are even plausible - that you have prototypes doing the thing even. Not one where you're merely experimenting with something new that might or might not pan out.
Name some other groundbreaking medical equipment that was brought about by VC funding, please.
da Vinci Surgical System, Zio Patch cardiac monitor, Butterfly iQ handheld ultrasound, Swoop portable MRI, Shockwave Intravascular Lithotripsy, CardioMEMS HF System, Tablo Hemodialysis System, MONARCH robotic bronchoscopy platform, Mako robotic-arm orthopedic surgery system.
Thanks to the Zio patch I was finally able to convince doctors I actually had a heart condition that I had been telling them I had for years. For about a decade they were telling me my irregular rhythm was due to anxiety.
What was it? Thyroid?
Which of those is groundbreaking? The Butterly handheld ultrasound is old technology in a new form factor with a bunch of trade offs. Useful in some situations, sure, but “groundbreaking”? Same with the Swoop portable MRI: existing technology, different form factor, big trade offs.
You’ve pretty much demonstrated the criticism is true, that all these grandiose claims made by VC backed medical device companies are… bunk. They made something smaller and shittier, yay?
butterfly and the swoop are both essentially useless too compared to their reference devices
Apart from THAT what have the Romans ever done for us?
I'm not sure the da Vinci Surgical System is a good example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4941968/
First gut reaction: this is a made up list. But it checks out. verified
actually i think the chatbot you consulted listed a bunch of stuff that is a pretty bad example of VC (deep capital markets) leading biotech innovation. Shockwave is a good example - HistoSonics is a much better example and was written about on HN. By comparison Intuitive has conclusively discovered that outcomes are more or less the same as non-teleoperated laparoscopic procedures, at least ones common enough to do a comparison.
Thank you for dealing with yet another midwit.
I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutions
Or maybe, because it's not really useful for much.
This is AI right?
Everything long form on Twitter these days is.
and never mind on Medium
one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat
Midjourney seems useless these days, not even sure why would anyone use.
MidJourney has better style than most other image generators, especially for artistic images.
Unfortunately it hasn't kept up on image quality, detail, or text rendering. I think this is because they don't have the $ to keep up in the scaling game.
I'm not a doctor but (Isn't there always a but after someone saying they aren't a doctor?) it seems to me we need three things to bring in a true revolution:
- 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.
The problem is there's an inverse relationship between penetration of the sound waves and the frequency.
and the heating
Yeah there's a point where I'd rather have the radiation than ultrasound.
Given the incentives (an ai booster account who is also prompting chat to write his posts) does this even belong on HN? I feel like our standards have dropped so much in the last two years.
If you don't like the post, say something about the post itself. At the moment your criticism sounds like "I don't like this world we live in"
The criticism of “these posts are AI generated” seems like something that is about the posts themselves?