[moduspol]

The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations.

I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?

Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.

[nancyminusone]

I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes?

Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?

[sbarre]

I think you (and others) are getting caught up in your own worse-case interpretation of the words of that statement, instead of looking at the intent of it.

It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".

[nancyminusone]

I'm sorry, I do not take implied statements lightly in regards to medical.

[CooCooCaCha]

The only relevant implication is the word “useful”. Clearly we want useful data, that’s obvious.

[malfist]

There is no indication that the data being sampled by midjourney is useful.

[CooCooCaCha]

The root level comment is talking about their general vision of healthcare. We’re talking about ideal goals here.

Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.

[ForgotIdAgain]

The massive data gathering part should only be part of the learning phase of the system imo, once it get a good model of reality it should infer useful knowledge information from few data, like an expert.

[tempfile]

Huh? You don't have to come up with an interpretation. The brief says it "looks a lot like today's MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed". They don't explain why having a hundred times as many MRI images would lead to better diagnostic outcomes. It is not like ultrasound scanning is a new idea, and they don't give any particular reason why this suggestion was not used before (other than "...data?")

[atonse]

It's not just about better diagnostic outcomes. Currently MRIs are a horrible, claustrophobic experience, and MRI machines are so insanely expensive that it is a bigger deal just to prescribe one.

So even if it is only as good as an MRI, or even 80% as good as an MRI, if it is much cheaper and much more pleasant to go through, you will get MORE people doing it, and get it prescribed in more situations.

That's at least how I read the benefits, democratization of imaging techniques rather than just improvement.

[airstrike]

Hard to say it's actually more useful data

[cptaj]

That is absolutely not what they meant. Do you really, honestly think they're that stupid?

[LastTrain]

I think they think we are that stupid.

[nancyminusone]

No I don't. So why say it?

[moduspol]

I think if we already had everyone wearing commercially available continuous glucose monitors and gathered and analyzed that data, we'd already have diagnosed and solved a lot of our most common health problems.

Obviously not all data is useful or meaningful, but even with the tech we already have, there's a ton of it that we're just not collecting or using.

[40four]

This is a bit of a contrived example. The “megabytes per second per dollar” is clearly in reference to their scanner technology that the say generates terabytes worth of data, with the goal of a scan taking around 60 seconds. So I’m confused about exactly what your point is?

That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.

If you don’t want then scan then carry on as usual.

[jmye]

> That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.

This is deeply silly and nonsensical framing. You don't want "lots of data really fast", you want high-quality, diagnostically useful data. If the fastest way to generate that is via 15-minute MRIs, then that is vastly more ideal than a bullshit scan that takes seconds.

[randomfrogs]

The problem is that it's not clear how useful those terabytes of information are. Ultrasound is very good for certain types of imaging, but the contrast mechanisms available are very limited - super high resolution images of uniform intensity aren't useful. An imaging method isn't useful if it doesn't help you discriminate what you want to see from what you don't. The reason MR is so useful is that it has so many contrasts available (T1, T2, proton density, flow speed, diffusion coefficient, diffusion direction, chemical composition, tissue elasticity, BOLD activation, and many other more esoteric ones). In an hour long scan, even with rapid acquisitions, you usually only get a few gigabytes of data, but that data has a LOT of information about your tissue - that's the reason the scanner keeps starting and stopping and making different noises, it's taking MANY different types of images with complementary information.

[abustamam]

I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.

I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.

[nlkkjhlkjsd]

I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data.

But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.

I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.

[pigpop]

It's funny because these criticisms are similar to the ones that Raymond Damadian faced when he was trying to develop the MRI. He was criticized for just being a doctor and not an NMR specialist, criticized for making bold claims based on the crude initial images that he presented, criticized for being too exuberant about the potential of the technology, criticized for only having a small group of non-expert graduate students and his own self-taught electronics and machining knowledge. He eventually founded his own company to commercialize the technology and even then he fought an uphill battle for 8 more years.

[stalfie]

The criticism is also similar to those faced by Theranos. Survivorship bias is always a factor when looking backwards.

[moduspol]

I think the only way you figure out which data has value is by collecting it first. And I don't trust pharma any more than I trust tech.

I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.

[zephyreon]

> But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.

I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.

[bsiverly]

It all depends how many times I need to go to their med spa to get the benefits of the imaging.

[christina97]

GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data.

Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?

[moduspol]

I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.

[jmye]

> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have.

What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.

Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

[moregrist]

Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”

It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.

This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.

They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.

[moduspol]

> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.

It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.

> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.

[aerodexis]

> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it

So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.

I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:

1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers

1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.

All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.

The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.

[forshaper]

In a more sane universe, we'd have been further along simply standardizing & centralizing patient records for providers, figuring out base rates, and communicating those base rates to providers.

[andai]

The synthetic doctor is raised on megabytes.

(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)

[lanstin]

data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochondria, receptor shapes, expressed proteins, etc.). If this company was a bunch of biology grad students getting the AI bug, I'd be hopefully curious, but for a bunch of "generate images" folks to try to go back from low-res images to biology, seems a bit naive. Like not knowing how much DNA and RNA information there is in the body naive. I'm sure their leaders are good at financial engineering, but for effectively "proactively keeping you healthy", mmm, maybe not.

Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc.

As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.

[mawadev]

I hope it doesn't proactively Xray me 5 times a day

[MichaelZuo]

That is a good point. There’s no point arguing about how well the map correlates with the territory… if the map isn’t even in your hands yet.

[cseleborg]

It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.

Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.

[moduspol]

We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit.

You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.

[pigpop]

Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc.

The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.

[cseleborg]

True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.

Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.