[iandanforth]

Not a physician. Some observations on these statements.

The predicate is "given how we practice medicine and the limits of humans ability to interpret the imaging modalities we have."

The more specific predicate is "for my specialty would this replace or prove superior to the tools that I have?"

Both of these are totally reasonable, however the history of medicine, and science in general, is that creating new ways to look at things has a tendency to reveal information that we never knew we needed.

For example, for years I thought of blood sugar as something that was either in a good or bad range. Then I tried a continuous blood sugar monitor. The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening. There's so much more to learn when you get a higher resolution (temporal in that case) view into your body.

Another wonderfully hopeful example is the retinal imaging ML work done by google. A completely non-invasive image of the retina for diabetic issues, that also happened to be able to predict things like age, sex, smoking status, previous cardiac events and more! Just take high-res pictures of things! The body is interconnected in ways that you can infer from one system so much about others.

So while I don't think anything the Dr. said is "wrong", I think it represents a very common blinkered mindset of pragmatic practitioners who need to deliver reliable performance daily.

[jmhmd]

Your points are well taken, and I think this is the fundamental struggle of anyone who works in a narrow and deep field. It's truly difficult to see things from a different point of view sometimes. It certainly could turn out that this ultrasound setup gives truly new information, but, it isn't really a new way of generating an image, it's the same physics we've used to generate images from sound waves for decades, and that modality comes with some pretty hard physical limitations that this demo does not directly address. Time will tell, if they don't run out of money. I'm hopeful!

[mrandish]

It's true that sometimes deeply experienced professionals are less likely to discover or accept novel methods based on new approaches or technologies. Unfortunately, in this case MJ's proposed product is being deceptively presented to appear as if it's the kind of bold new approach we all hope to see in medicine - but it's not. It's a repackaging of an existing product that's already on the market.

MJ is buying the transducer chips used in Butterfly's low-cost, handheld, pocket-sized USB ultrasound device (it's not an R&D license, they're literally buying the same chip). The repackaging is to turn it into a contactless, 360 degree-at-once, 60 second full body scanner. Every aspect of the repackaging provides the same singular benefit over the Butterfly device: convenience. Unfortunately, every aspect of the repackaging has the same two downsides: lower resolution (meaning lower diagnostic value) and higher cost.

Spoiler alert: moving the imaging transducers 200-400 times farther away from your organs and introducing a large volume of water between the transducer and your skin in no way improves resolution or diagnostic value (quite the opposite (exponentially!)). Having 40 transducers on a hula hoop ring that far away offers no value over having one transducer much closer and moving to as many angles as necessary to image the volume of interest - except it might be a few minutes faster.

So, this isn't an "exciting new approach to medical imaging." It's a marketing repackage of an existing medical product into a non-medical, higher-cost, 'spa experience' with trendy, tech-adjacent appeal and vaguely medical-ish window dressing (it's carefully disclaimed has having no medical value in this form). Since the exact same chip is already available in a much less expensive, far more ideal form that's fully repositionable to any angle, is closer (and can deform skin to get closer still), the real question is how much medically-relevant diagnostic value could MJ's repackage of the same chip offer over the existing better, cheaper implementation? Butterfly's version is already FDA approved with proven diagnostic value. And all of MJ's hype around 'AI-powered' isn't about improving diagnostics, it's only necessary to recover at least some signal from the hurricane of noise and multi-path issues created by the adding MJ's cool-looking convenience features. But slowly being lowered into that tank with the neat ambient light ring sure looks sci-fi, right?

[calf]

Exponentially would make it computationally intractable by definition, and is the proposal suggestion that having simultaneous sensors can be used to reconstruct more information than the conventional way of using a handheld single sensor? Is that plausible?

[mrandish]

Good question. Trying to 'steel-man' MJ's approach, that was the only possible benefit vs the existing Butterfly product which I hadn't crossed out yet, so I asked the only actual radiologist here about the possibility of having additional receivers off-axis from the emitter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590631).

But frankly, I'm losing interest trying to glean what someone might be thinking, when they're being so intentionally opaque while making such grandiose vague claims. The bottom line is, if they really thought this way of nerfing Butterfly's chip '9-steps back' with disadvantages, would truly unlock 12-steps forward in actual medical imaging utility, they wouldn't be launching it as a 'feature' of a vanity spa with nothing but vague 'tech visionary' puffery.

[dominotw]

> The full picture of the body's response to specific foods that I ate was eye opening.

you were surprised to find out that stress and carbs raise blood sugar?

[lanstin]

I'm doing this now, and the thing I find most surprising is that there seems to be some invisible persistent state that gives high or low sugar a sort of momentum - so if I've been doing a fair amount of physical activity for a month, I can lay slugabed for two days and still drive to have a slice of pizza in the afternoon without trouble; but if I've been slacking on the activity piece, or arguing with my spouse, or travelling and eating a lot of dubious things, I can walk five kms to a pizza place, eat the slice, walk the 5 kms back, and it will still spike. Also I have issues with the CGM being higher than the prick-blood test, like 40 points higher rather consistently. A1C is still dropping, but the CGM numbers are more directionally accurate than numerically accurate.

[DANmode]

That “invisible persistent influence on your current state” are your metabolic processes.