7 ms·
I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month? For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talki
by verandaguy 3mo ago
I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month?
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
- jofzar 3mo agoTheoretically if this was possible (and I doubt it is, like c'mon) then it could be used for early detection of cancer.
- compass_copium 3mo agoFrom what I've read, full body scans are awful for this--your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous.
- owenpalmer 3mo agoI'm not so worried about the data being useful, I'm worried about the machine actually working. I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
- genocidicbunny 3mo ago> What's so bad about having some false positives? Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation. It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
- owenpalmer 3mo agoWhy would you jump from an ultrasound to chemotherapy? It's not meant to be a definitive diagnosis, it's just an early screening process...
- genocidicbunny 3mo agoBecause that was exactly the jump for me. Ultrasound led to expedited surgery that happened within 2 weeks of the ultrasound. The results of the surgery led to chemotherapy. It wasn't long between the ultrasound and BEP being hooked up.
- askmike 3mo agoThe more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences. Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bonsai_spool 3mo ago> The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. On what basis do you say this? There is an extensive literature that refutes this. Scanners have been getting much better since the first CT scans and many more people are getting them.
- gpm 3mo agoFalse positives aren't a consequence of having the data, they're a consequence of misusing the data to issue diagnoses with insufficient evidence. "Just" don't set your thresholds for diagnosis so that you do that.
- kanzure 3mo ago> your body forms and kills tumors all the time. The false positive rate is ridiculous. Um, that's still a tumor.
- gpm 3mo agoYeah but it's not cancer.
- schoen 3mo agoUltrasound can also detect (some) kidney stones before they start moving and become painful, allowing an assessment of whether a medical intervention is useful or necessary. When I used to get kidney stones more frequently, there was a year or so when my doctor sent me for an ultrasound every few months to try to detect them in advance (!). I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans. Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't. (At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
- kanzure 3mo agoThere's no reason that ultrasound imaging equipment needs to be expensive. Overall the parts are pretty cheap. I think everyone should have one next to their toothbrush. Whole body ultrasound scans would also be useful, although harder to place inside everyone's homes.
- sandworm101 3mo agoLol. This isnt for everyone. This is for the rich. They are going to sell these things for personal use, for installation in homes. Take the top 100,000 families in the US, those that can afford a home unit. Scans then become as normal as taking a bath. We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
- tptacek 3mo agoIt's really not OK to victimize the rich like this either.
- ttoinou 3mo agoPoor good. Rich bad. Good stuff should go directly to poor good people, never go to rich bad people. But that thing is for rich so by definition it is bad and not for the poor
- Paracompact 3mo agoRich people have a phobia of death, unlike the rest of us for whom depression, disease, and injustice have really removed the sting of death and turned it more into "eh, if it happens it happens." So worry not: The rich wasting their money on biohacking fads are not being scammed, they are being consoled.
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoIsn't therapy or enlightenment ultimately cheaper?
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- verandaguy 3mo agoHot take: the rich (especially the upper strata of the rich) are perfectly comfortable victimizing the non-rich in some material ways (from monopolistic practices, to lobbying against labour interests and union busting, to regulatory capture, to name a few). To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
- therealdrag0 3mo agoI would guess build a health prediction model. Instead of next text token or next frame in a video, how about next 12 months or years of body health? Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.
- jonahx 3mo ago> What possible use could there be for doing this? Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine. The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
- nihonde 3mo ago"What possible use could there be for doing this?" I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry. What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
- lonely_wanderer 3mo agoA counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary. There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
- nihonde 3mo agoIn Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right? The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
- klausa 3mo agoThere's a world of difference between the health checkups we get in Japan, and something like a full-body MRI/CT. You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.
- nihonde 3mo agoAre you joking? 人間ドック is absolutely more than a "health checkup". Maybe do some reading: https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/ https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/ > The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
- d_burfoot 3mo ago> What possible use could there be for doing this? The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
- sheepolog 3mo ago> What possible use could there be for doing this? Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.
- dumbmrblah 3mo agoWho reads these scans and who assume liabilities for missed reads?
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoAI[no one]. The customer.