There's no AI in anything right now, we're just using physics based classical algorithms. It makes sense to eventually use AI but in the context of like initializing a physics solver to reduce the step-count.
Yes. We are right to be suspicious due to the main goal of start ups and corporations: profit for their shareholders. Theranos will always be in the back of my mind regarding healthcare technology start ups.
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.
one of the lead paper authors (jinhua xu) works at midjourney, appears in the video, and comments specifically on how the midjourney approach is the next, significantly better-funded iteration of the paper approach
If you watch the video, the original prototype had hand built piezoelectic array, which was a complete pain and nowhere near as good as the current revision. This one uses COTS hardware, just lots (40+) of them.
There's one GIGANTIC difference between Midjourney and Theranos.
Midjourney's money is their own ... I know that's hard to believe but it's true. They don't have to lick any boots (or worse) to put bread on their mouths.
This definitely isn't another Theranos. Theranos claimed to have a blood test that didn't actually exist. This is "just" standard ultrasound but with a much wider aperture than normal. There's no new science, it's just engineering that nobody else has put the effort in to actually do.
One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives.
Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art.
my worry is two fold:
1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have invasive surgery only to find out that its a reflection/artefact
2) what are they doing with the data they collect, and how will it be used to make money.
I think the main issue is that there are "no good startups" any more. As soon as an innovation happens that might be worth something, your original CEO is replaced by someone driven entirely by money, rather than public good. Or they get bought out by a corp that only cares about maintaining a monopoly.
In the video David says he's building it just because he wants to. It really sounds like his own passion project. No investors. It's a nice position to be in.
Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.
It’s literally a little fun side project for them and it’s in no way attempting to make billions by manipulating results. They straight up show and tell the limitations of what they are doing. Theranos was a complete scam from the get go and lied all the way til the end. I don’t see a single similarity
They don't make any specific claims about what conditions it will diagnose. At 16:30, he says they are only initially doing "body composition" because anything more would add 9+ months to the deployment timeline. I assume they mean they process the images to return an estimate of body fat/muscle mass. Which isn't difficult and it seems likely they could get the error bars pretty low just off estimating subq fat alone. He doesn't say the specific classification they received from the FDA, just that it is a class 2 medical device.
Just reliably estimating body fat and muscle mass could already sell well with high-class fitness studios. Those already offer those scales with handheld probes as a feature, and those contraptions are horribly inaccurate. With this you not only get accurate estimates, you can also attribute them to your body parts.
"This month you gained 5% muscles mass in your upper arms, but lost 3% in your core muscles" "Body fat in your upper thighs reduced by 10%. You are on track to reach your goal in 6 months". It might be expensive, but there would be plenty of customers willing to pay for that
Then they can work on getting price down and accuracy up, both of which seem to be goals for the future
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.
I dont understand though, why you have to simultanously do this from all sides- have the ultrasound swim around with the patient? Takes out the comlexity?
Or use boundary layers to keep the sound on the slice?
I don’t know if you’re joking, but liquid breathing has only really been tested on rats, like famously the one from The Abyss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss, which died a couple of days later.
As I understood it, they're using the rest of the array to receive when one is transmitting, thus getting signal from the opposite side of the body as well. I don't see how you can do this with just one device.
> I dont understand though, why you have to simultanously do this from all sides- have the ultrasound swim around with the patient? Takes out the comlexity?
One sensor can only see waves that reflect straight back. If you have more sensors (and fire them sequentially, like they do) you can detect pulses that are deflected, and measure the deflection angle. That gives you much better data
I get the impression that what they want is real-time scans, so you can see the organs moving and everything. But that would require a 3d arrangement of sensors, which is too expensive. Instead they have a 2d arrangement and move the sensor relative to the person in 1d. Having only one sensor and moving it in 2d would harm scanning speed and fidelity even more.
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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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] thread[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
Midjourney's money is their own ... I know that's hard to believe but it's true. They don't have to lick any boots (or worse) to put bread on their mouths.
Because of this I'm massively bullish on them.
One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives.
Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art.
my worry is two fold:
1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have invasive surgery only to find out that its a reflection/artefact
2) what are they doing with the data they collect, and how will it be used to make money.
I think the main issue is that there are "no good startups" any more. As soon as an innovation happens that might be worth something, your original CEO is replaced by someone driven entirely by money, rather than public good. Or they get bought out by a corp that only cares about maintaining a monopoly.
Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.
A cynical view is it's all about $$$$.
Either way it's great HN content!
Can't wait to read your papers and/or watch your videos where you show us :).
"This month you gained 5% muscles mass in your upper arms, but lost 3% in your core muscles" "Body fat in your upper thighs reduced by 10%. You are on track to reach your goal in 6 months". It might be expensive, but there would be plenty of customers willing to pay for that
Then they can work on getting price down and accuracy up, both of which seem to be goals for the future
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 dont understand though, why you have to simultanously do this from all sides- have the ultrasound swim around with the patient? Takes out the comlexity?
Or use boundary layers to keep the sound on the slice?
One sensor can only see waves that reflect straight back. If you have more sensors (and fire them sequentially, like they do) you can detect pulses that are deflected, and measure the deflection angle. That gives you much better data
I get the impression that what they want is real-time scans, so you can see the organs moving and everything. But that would require a 3d arrangement of sensors, which is too expensive. Instead they have a 2d arrangement and move the sensor relative to the person in 1d. Having only one sensor and moving it in 2d would harm scanning speed and fidelity even more.
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.