There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that.
Stay tuned for new versions of the scanner! Hopefully later this year. The physical limitations are still far beyond all the current implementations. We'll see how far we can push it. If it's not far enough to be useful then at least we tried :) but I'd be surprised if it isn't useful so that's why im betting our own money on it.
One thing that’s kinda awkward in the video: they mention one of the big shortcomings of ultrasound being that it can’t image “airy” organs like the lungs, and their expert responds to that by mentioning that the amount of angles/devices means that you still get imaging of everything surrounding the lungs.
But the critiscism isn’t that the lungs would obstruct you from imaging certain areas, it’s that there’s just very salient parts of the body that you can’t really image with ultrasound, which means this would not be a full bodyscan even if the resolution was incredible.
I think there’s some genuine intent here, if for no other reason than that it seems silly to transition from ai to hardware if you’re purely trying to grift. I just wish they responded candidly to the obvious questions people have.
Every imaging modality has pros and cons. Like CT imaging is bad at soft tissues but much better at bones than MRI. This physics has a lot of really cool and unique properties and imho it obviously makes sense for someone to invest in them. And we are (with our own money, no investors, etc). In my mind, in the future, you really want the best "megabytes per second per dollar" about your body. And it's hard to beat this by that measure. It's also very possible to keep adding more and more sensors to this system. I'd love to add some more that further improve the imaging inside the lungs and brain. We'll see how far we get but imho over the long run we'll be the fastest way to do a lot of things and it will help a lot of people.
I’m just wondering when people are going to realize sticking your body into water being vibrated with ultrasound isn’t a good idea?
I used to have ultrasonic cleaner for jewelry and one of the things advised is to not put your hand in the water when it’s vibrating as it can be bad for your bones.
This skepticism is weird to me. I might be overly naive, but it looks like these are people that have funding for doing something they think is cool and think could help people out. Whether or not it turns out that way is something we'll have to see, but the premise of just going ahead and building the thing should be applauded in my opinion
The new scanning technique is very fancy, but it sounds like people might be better of with boring full body visual imaging to check for skin cancer. If they want an AI angle to that, Midjourney could easily make a digital twin from the scan.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] thread[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
But the critiscism isn’t that the lungs would obstruct you from imaging certain areas, it’s that there’s just very salient parts of the body that you can’t really image with ultrasound, which means this would not be a full bodyscan even if the resolution was incredible.
I think there’s some genuine intent here, if for no other reason than that it seems silly to transition from ai to hardware if you’re purely trying to grift. I just wish they responded candidly to the obvious questions people have.
I used to have ultrasonic cleaner for jewelry and one of the things advised is to not put your hand in the water when it’s vibrating as it can be bad for your bones.