Another thing that had me sort of scratching my head about this tweet were these sections (emphasis mine):
> If the Midjourney ultrasound is high resolution, harmless, inexpensive and convenient, people can get an initial scan...
> If the MIdjourney device can be repeated frequently, like weekly, at a low cost and is harmless..
This particular author is backtracking on his original idea that lots of frequent scans are bad, as long as they are cheap and accurate. But that's a pretty irrelevant side issue IMO when the vast majority of objections I've seen to Midjourney's announcement have been that qualified folks just don't believe the tech is medically feasible - it won't have the necessary resolution to discriminate findings.
I'm not faulting the author, who was quite clear where he did a rethink, but I do fault people who somehow think this is evidence that Midjourney's scanner will be viable.
TBH, while I don't think the Midjourney announcement is the same level of malevolence as Theranos, I don't think it was quite far off. I'm baffled that people think science and medicine should be done by a flashy website and PR-speak instead of the sober language of research reports, but I guess that's just a (sad, IMO) sign of the times.
the vast majority of objections I've seen to Midjourney's announcement have been that qualified folks just don't believe the tech is medically feasible
The original Midjourney Medical thread here on HN was loaded with people confidently declaring that these kinds of scans are a bad idea and net negative because of the risk of false positives.
> The original Midjourney Medical thread here on HN was loaded with people confidently declaring that these kinds of scans are a bad idea and net negative because of the risk of false positives.
Conditional on low base rates, and the need for invasive follow-up testing, they are likely to cause more problems than they solve.
But personally, I love all this stuff and have an emotional belief that more data is always better, which is weird in cases like this where it turns out that's not the case.