[aeonik]

Why can't we do full body scans, learn about these "quirks", and document them in the wider science literature?

I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.

[KaiserPro]

Good question!

Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication.

To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is that you'll see lots of lumps and bumps growing, and this could lead to lots of invasive checks. You can't not check because that's not fair "here is something that looks like cancer, if we grab it now it will stop you needing chemo. But it could just be a cyst."

So, its really really expensive to have 100k people getting monthly full body MRIs for 10+ years. Even more expensive to get them at the right resolution.

I think, that if these scanners are good and that is _Very much_ not proven. Then having a long term study would be good. I however have deep misgivings about how effective field array ultrasonic scans are, also safety.

I also do not trust midjourney, a company that exists through large scale copyright infringement to handle that data safely, ethically or in a way that would allow decent science to be done from it.

[pigpop]

The entire point of this machine seems to be to do non-invasive scans that don't have the type of side effects that constant CT scans would have and which are vastly cheaper and easier to do than MRI so that you can collect longitudinal data on any/all individuals.

Finding "lumps and bumps" or incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI, maybe your doctor would want a follow up MRI as a closer look but if it seems likely benign they could easily recommend you to just keep scanning with this ultrasound machine and only get another MRI or biopsy if it seems to develop in a malignant way.

The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief when it comes to the development of new medical technology. Many groundbreaking devices were developed through the efforts of individuals, including the MRI.

[KaiserPro]

> The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief

the full body MRI was developed in the NHS/university along with CT scanners. But let us not pretend that modern companies have been acting in a way that is ethical. OR that there exists a legal framework that fights for the rights of normal people.

> incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI

They are a problem because we have no real data on cancer incidents that don't develop. (https://ima.org.uk/24626/making-sense-of-cancer-with-profess... buried in this article)

Biopsies are not risk free. General anaesthetic carries a risk. You'll be on antibiotics, the wound will have an infection risk. Also the build up of scar tissue is a real issue.

This is the ethical issue. Because suspicious lumps will need investigation, no ethics board is going to allow not investigating.

This also fucks up the data.

Its not impossible, but it needs sensible thought, thought from actual medical professionals, rather than a company who is at best operating in a legal grey zone.

[mapkkk]

We can and do full body scans. Typically in the context of research, or for focus/metastasis search in current clinical settings.

The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.

Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.

I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.

However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.

Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.

[spongebobstoes]

"the people can't be trusted with knowledge" is a bad argument

we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently

collect data passively. when a medical condition arises, you have a data source to correlate against the onset of the condition

currently we have almost no data, so doctors need to run multiple tests to identify possible causes

[jmye]

> we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently

So your take is we just do the testing and ignore it's outputs entirely, until something comes up? And that is somehow different and better than current imaging processes?

> currently we have almost no data

This is absolute fucking nonsense.

[spongebobstoes]

my take is simply three points

1/ telemetry is operationally useful in systems engineering 2/ the human body is a system 3/ this is a step towards telemetry for the human body

> currently we have almost no data

this is accurate. ordinary people might get blood drawn once per year. that is almost no data, relative to a monthly or weekly full-body ultrasound

[mapkkk]

It's not that I don't believe people can't be trusted with information. I regularly introduce basic diagnostic/statistical concepts to patients to explain why a certain test is needed, and why another would be wasted time and anxiety.

Tools are only effective in their purpose when one knows when and how to use them. Most things are imperfect, or a game of balancing benefits vs. shortcomings.

If a patient learns the potential pitfalls and strengths of a testing method, then I would trust them to apply it judiciously. But a biweekly medical scan you can go to as easily as a spa is not that.

Similarly: data matters, sure, but the quality of the data matters just as much. If the signal to noise ratio is too low then what's the point of gathering it?

[pigpop]

I understand the argument but imagine if it were applied to other nascent technologies like the microscope, which incidentally was also viewed with suspicion by doctors who (accurately) cited flaws in early models such as chromatic and spherical aberration. Thankfully, many people persisted in developing it including non-medical polymaths like Robert Hooke. I recognize this may cause some headaches for doctors dealing with insistent patients but I doubt it will be a permanent problem as the technology develops further and becomes more widespread.

[GTP]

I think we may be looking at a very large, if not potentially infinite, set of quirks. And there's the risk of worrying people for nothing. So, if this is the plan, at the very least, it should take the form of a large medical study and not a shiny machine for fancy spas.

[dd36]

Isn’t that a similar argument against AI?

[GTP]

Sorry, I don't get your point.

[fastasucan]

Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it? Over treatment can be a real problem. You dont want to take medisine you dont need, or spend much time in a hospital if there is no net positive outcome.

[timjver]

> Over treatment can be a real problem.

Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.

[aeonik]

For me?

If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise.

And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors.

Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off.

I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.

[cityofdelusion]

You won’t know they are benign unless you plan on a biopsy or surgery for every finding. It’s exactly this reason why we only regularly scan people that have say, known cancer.

[pigpop]

They'll know whether they're getting bigger or not. Pretty much the same for if you have a lump just under your skin that you can see and feel but this would allow you to see the ones further inside. So you just have to take the same attitude and advice towards them that a doctor would give you about the surface level lumps. What's the difference?

[jappgar]

And for what? Is it just morbid curiosity or is there something you plan to do with that information.

[senordevnyc]

It’s right there in their second line

[ChrisRR]

But from what this says, it's not accurate enough to determine benign vs cancerous lumps

[GTP]

Just to add to this. My heart pumps blood in a known but different way than normal. I know because, to practice sports in my home country, it is required to undergo a specific checkup that includes an ECG. However, despite doing that visit many times, only two doctors ever mentioned this condition. The reason is that it causes no issue at all, so they just don't want to worry people for nothing by telling them their heart is pumping in a different way than most other people.

[OGWhales]

I would rather know that than have the information hidden from me. It's also not hard to imagine a scenario where such quirks are harmless on their own, but might be relevant in the future or for reasons the doctor is missing. I guess it's true some people would panic at any sort of quirk they find, but I find that frustrating as someone that doesn't think that way.

Further, as someone that has spent far too much time and money trying to find the root cause of a particular issue (with absurdly frustrating inefficiencies in terms of being bounced around, insurance nonsense, etc), I am generally in favor of improving our ability to find a lot of information in a manner like this. Doctors are generally good at finding very common issues they see all the time, much worse at anything uncommon. This can be a real problem. I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases, we might find a lot of issues that were hard to catch without that scale of information. I also think preemptive scanning would catch a lot of issues that go otherwise unnoticed for much longer than they should go, something that also happened to me, but is mostly an issue of systemic inefficiencies in our current healthcare system rather than something that this technology is required to solve. In my case, doing some simple checks that they felt weren't necessary because I seemed healthy would've caught it much earlier.

[GTP]

> I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases

Was this presented as an opportunity for researchers to be able to run more large scale studies involving full scans I woukd have a different take. This is however presented as a shiny toy to be put in a spa, that gives you images you don't know how to interpret anyway, or at best gives you some AI-powered report.

The rest that you're saying points more to issues of you country's Healthcare system, and it isn't clear if and how this technology would improve that.

[x187463]

> Because if a "condition" doesn't impact you, will it help to be aware of it?

Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.

[muggesmuds]

Because a lot of things showing up in scans you wont know what is until you cut them out or do a biopsy. And even then you might never know if that thing would have progressed to become a problem. Scanning more will not solve that.

[dtj1123]

Realistically this data is going to be used to train a closed source model, not to contribute to the scientific literature.