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bhoustontoday at 2:36 AM2 repliesview on HN

But isn’t this much cheaper and easier so even if they are not quite a good, the accessibility and ease and thus much more data is better?


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rflrobtoday at 2:52 AM

More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.

It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet

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themantalopetoday at 2:40 AM

Other than the shapes of the tissues in the images, there is no anatomic detail. Wouldn't be useful for diagnostics. It's substantially worse than conventional ultrasound.

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