[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.