[fellowmartian]

Full body MRI scans are only expensive in the West, outside the west you can get one done for $250. This is a labor and regulatory capture problem and not a technology problem and will not be affected in any meaningful way by better superconductors.

[hwillis]

Even if it were $250, that's a pretty high cost relative to the annual cost of insurance. It's too high to justify as a routine diagnostic tool. The financial benefit here is that earlier identification would save money in the long term treatment. MRIs don't cure cancer, so the direct benefit only applies to the limited savings on a very small subset of people of the people who actually get cancers that could be identified earlier.

The real benefits are indirect (from the viewpoint of the insurance people who unfortunately pay for it)- quality of life is much better if you catch it earlier, and the medical research benefits are huge.

Realistically, it's also not $250 even outside the US- not for the resolution needed to diagnose cancers. That's below the depreciation cost of a high end (say $1M) machine. 12 scans a day (it takes roughly an hour for an average scan, 12 is per day per machine is pretty average[1]) 7 days a week for 10 years is 43,800 scans. So ignoring interest, labor, and absolutely everything else that's $228 per scan.

A full body MRI takes an hour only for small patients. More realistically 1.5-2 hours.

[1]: https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=di...

[ricardobeat]

$250 is a ton of money outside ”the west” (I assume you mean US/Europe/Aus). It’s roughly the minimum wage in Brazil.

[fellowmartian]

I know, but my point is that the price doesn’t scale with machine and helium costs, but with labor costs and the level of insurance racket a particular country has. Obviously it’d be great if we didn’t require helium supply chains to make medical scans, but unfortunately we can’t fix everything with technology alone.

[jacquesm]

The cost of the machines will drop considerably so it definitely will have an effect. That $250 is still a lot of money for many people and if not covered by insurance and in the developing part of the world it is utterly unaffordable.