Are there? My impression is that basically the only thing that can go wrong with ultrasound is they pump too much energy into you, and as risks go that seems both difficult to screw up and easy to make sure you don't screw up.
The imaging might be useless, but then that's why it's a spa treatment. I assume the primary use cases for this are (at least until it's developed a lot more seriously) "cute" non-medical baby images and body composition - the former of which can't really go wrong and the competition for the latter is a scale with some electrodes making shit up anyways.
Start with low-volume runs targeted at upperclass customers who can afford the pricetag. Bonus points for a group that has a proven track record of spending unreasonable sums for unproven technology. Over time the user story, manufacturing, parts sourcing, regulatory approvals all get sorted out and you can move down into bigger and bigger markets and lower and lower price points
Of course that risks being associated with all the crap the same high-spenders spend their cash on
[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
"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
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 :).
Midjourney's money is their own. They don't have to lick anyone's boots (or worse) just to put bread on the table.
Don't ever confuse actual innovators with low-tier VC scammers. Because of that, I'm massively bullish on them.
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.
The common thread is commoditization of medical technology to enable more frequent and useful testing. But 3d ultrasound machines exist and Midjourney's setup looks completely plausible. Their big bet is that it's actually useful in medical applications beyond better baby pictures
Sure, visual imaging is cheap and high-definition, but it's also a pretty low value product. People can already see the outside of their body. Instead of a fancy full-body visual scanner just give them a pamphlet which things are normal, which are abnormal but harmless and which need a doctor visit.
Seeing the inside of your body on the other hand opens up a lot of things you previously couldn't see. We have to be careful not to overreact and try to "fix" all bodies to fit the image printed in the textbook. But the potential to do real good is huge
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.
Also ultrasound just isn't that good of an imaging technology, even with full aperture.
That said, it's non-ionising and if they can make this reasonably cheap (big if), then it's better than nothing at all. Probably decent for finding cancer, especially breast cancer (no pesky bones there!).
True, but ultrasound isn't entirely benign. Depending on what frequency and what power it can crack solid parts of the body (its used to break up kidney/gall stones) it also can heat things up (which is, assuming my understanding is correct, why doppler scans for blood flow are not done on <18 week pregancy)
We have screening programs for a reason. We know the sensitivity and specificity of these. They are widely available in any rich country that doesn’t treat its citizens like shit. There will absolutely be better stuff out there as we progress, with better sensitivity/specificity and lower harm (everything medical has some harm quotient) but I have a hard time wrapping my head around how they will best physics to provide better than state of the art today with this technology (and bow they will beat availability of current screening systems)
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? Turn this cocktail glass full of patient into a tequila sunrise?
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.
as I said, an image is doable, there is opensource to do that: https://hackaday.io/project/159467-open-source-ultrasonic-ph...
accurate and repeatable is that hard bit.
Thats the point right, most of us would, if given the chance, divert some funding to work on a passion project that could easily save lives. That I applaud and would love more people to be able to do.
My point is, phased arrays of ultrasound have the ability to be destructive. In the same way that a single MIMO wifi AP isn't going to cook you, but 10,000 MIMO arrays steering coherently over you will.