> 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.
This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.
The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.
I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?
Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.
I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes?
Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?
I think you (and others) are getting caught up in your own worse-case interpretation of the words of that statement, instead of looking at the intent of it.
It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".
I'm sorry, I do not take implied statements lightly in regards to medical.
The only relevant implication is the word “useful”. Clearly we want useful data, that’s obvious.
There is no indication that the data being sampled by midjourney is useful.
The root level comment is talking about their general vision of healthcare. We’re talking about ideal goals here.
Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.
The massive data gathering part should only be part of the learning phase of the system imo, once it get a good model of reality it should infer useful knowledge information from few data, like an expert.
Hard to say it's actually more useful data
Huh? You don't have to come up with an interpretation. The brief says it "looks a lot like today's MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed". They don't explain why having a hundred times as many MRI images would lead to better diagnostic outcomes. It is not like ultrasound scanning is a new idea, and they don't give any particular reason why this suggestion was not used before (other than "...data?")
It's not just about better diagnostic outcomes. Currently MRIs are a horrible, claustrophobic experience, and MRI machines are so insanely expensive that it is a bigger deal just to prescribe one.
So even if it is only as good as an MRI, or even 80% as good as an MRI, if it is much cheaper and much more pleasant to go through, you will get MORE people doing it, and get it prescribed in more situations.
That's at least how I read the benefits, democratization of imaging techniques rather than just improvement.
That is absolutely not what they meant. Do you really, honestly think they're that stupid?
I think they think we are that stupid.
No I don't. So why say it?
I think if we already had everyone wearing commercially available continuous glucose monitors and gathered and analyzed that data, we'd already have diagnosed and solved a lot of our most common health problems.
Obviously not all data is useful or meaningful, but even with the tech we already have, there's a ton of it that we're just not collecting or using.
This is a bit of a contrived example. The “megabytes per second per dollar” is clearly in reference to their scanner technology that the say generates terabytes worth of data, with the goal of a scan taking around 60 seconds. So I’m confused about exactly what your point is?
That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
If you don’t want then scan then carry on as usual.
The problem is that it's not clear how useful those terabytes of information are. Ultrasound is very good for certain types of imaging, but the contrast mechanisms available are very limited - super high resolution images of uniform intensity aren't useful. An imaging method isn't useful if it doesn't help you discriminate what you want to see from what you don't. The reason MR is so useful is that it has so many contrasts available (T1, T2, proton density, flow speed, diffusion coefficient, diffusion direction, chemical composition, tissue elasticity, BOLD activation, and many other more esoteric ones). In an hour long scan, even with rapid acquisitions, you usually only get a few gigabytes of data, but that data has a LOT of information about your tissue - that's the reason the scanner keeps starting and stopping and making different noises, it's taking MANY different types of images with complementary information.
I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.
I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.
> That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
This is deeply silly and nonsensical framing. You don't want "lots of data really fast", you want high-quality, diagnostically useful data. If the fastest way to generate that is via 15-minute MRIs, then that is vastly more ideal than a bullshit scan that takes seconds.
I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.
But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
It's funny because these criticisms are similar to the ones that Raymond Damadian faced when he was trying to develop the MRI. He was criticized for just being a doctor and not an NMR specialist, criticized for making bold claims based on the crude initial images that he presented, criticized for being too exuberant about the potential of the technology, criticized for only having a small group of non-expert graduate students and his own self-taught electronics and machining knowledge. He eventually founded his own company to commercialize the technology and even then he fought an uphill battle for 8 more years.
The criticism is also similar to those faced by Theranos. Survivorship bias is always a factor when looking backwards.
I think the only way you figure out which data has value is by collecting it first. And I don't trust pharma any more than I trust tech.
I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.
> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.
I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data.
Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?
I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.
In a more sane universe, we'd have been further along simply standardizing & centralizing patient records for providers, figuring out base rates, and communicating those base rates to providers.
> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have.
What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”
It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.
This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.
They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.
> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.
> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.
> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it
So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.
I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:
1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers
1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.
All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.
The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.
The synthetic doctor is raised on megabytes.
(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)
It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.
Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.
We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit.
You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.
True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.
Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.
Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc.
The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.
I hope it doesn't proactively Xray me 5 times a day
That is a good point. There’s no point arguing about how well the map correlates with the territory… if the map isn’t even in your hands yet.
Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not.
Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
False positives are the primary issue. False positives lead to stress, invasive diagnostic procedures and wasted medical resources. Look into the debate about what is the appropriate age for mammographies and how Apple Watches have resulted in overdiagnosis of heart conditions.
For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.
Today only I'll sell you 6GB of data for 6000USD its a steal. Buy now.
> Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it.
As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment).
What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege.
Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
Even those annual blood tests can be problematic.
When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high.
A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist visits than before. A lot more tests. After months of that all of the scary things were eventually ruled out. And then the values went back to normal. Nobody has an explanation even now.
This is just with a pretty standard battery of tests: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH with reflex, vitamin D. They catch enough bad things that they're generally worth ordering on a regular basis for healthy people at annual physicals. The occasional wild goose chases like what happened with me is the price we pay for catching the more serious things.
I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I have 2 autoimmune disorders/diseases, and I have spent the last 2 decades managing them. One of them (thyroid) is relatively easy, take my synthetic thyroid hormones ever day, and check my levels every 3 months to make sure I'm still good. The other is symptom management, which is less consistent, and a flair up from one causes the other to flair as well. And flairs are particularly hard to handle and function well.
> I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.
How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.
Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.
Okay, you're worried about too much data and false positives, but that's a problem you can get around by smoking a pack a day and not going to the doctor. The vast majority of people on the planet have exactly zero hard data on their ailments, and even if they spend their life savings trying to get a clear picture they may never have one.
Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
If you ask people to rank say 5 things from top to bottom where the first thing at the top is what they are least cost conscious about and the one at bottom is what they are most - I would bet health would at the top slot for most of us. So relatively we would spend (whatever we have) on our health versus other things if we had conviction on the outcome.
"I want to be able to walk without pain but if it's gonna be expensive forget it!"
The best thing you can do for low cost is 1) eat better food and 2) move more
"More data" is quite literally irrelevant.
People don't do anything with the data they already have, to your point.
Stand on a scale at the same time of day, every day. Track your intake. Track your output. See your PCP for your free AWV-equivalent, and keep an eye on your metrics.
But no, we need GB of scanner outputs because some medically-illiterate (but still the smartest-guy-in-the-room) techbros want them for... reasons.
After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image.
"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.
> A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not
You want technology to train you how to avoid environmental factors and then give you treatment?
we're still very far away from eliminating humans in the loop from medicine.
I want to give my money to actual individual doctors who studied this for a decade, have the work and life experience to make informed judgements and decisions to reason about my health. I dont want to pay a company to digitize my body and then sell the data back to me
>A) proactively keeping me healthy,
This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible
To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege.
Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.
Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?
I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.
This happens in a number of medical systems of countries across the world and is perfectly feasible, usually through premium subsidies for stuff like planned check ups, buying certain types of food and even installing equipment to monitor your driving behaviour. The thinking is that encouraging customers to be healthy reduces premium claims in the future
All I want is the safety that, if something is wrong, treating it won’t bankrupt me.
Everything you want in your desired healthcare system can be stored as data.