Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

This skepticism is weird to me. I might be overly naive, but it looks like these are people that have funding for doing something they think is cool and think could help people out. Whether or not it turns out that way is something we'll have to see, but the premise of just going ahead and building the thing should be applauded in my opinion

One thing that’s kinda awkward in the video: they mention one of the big shortcomings of ultrasound being that it can’t image “airy” organs like the lungs, and their expert responds to that by mentioning that the amount of angles/devices means that you still get imaging of everything surrounding the lungs.

But the critiscism isn’t that the lungs would obstruct you from imaging certain areas, it’s that there’s just very salient parts of the body that you can’t really image with ultrasound, which means this would not be a full bodyscan even if the resolution was incredible.

I think there’s some genuine intent here, if for no other reason than that it seems silly to transition from ai to hardware if you’re purely trying to grift. I just wish they responded candidly to the obvious questions people have.

There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that.

[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

Good to see Mr. Valente is doing well

Does this whole thing seem fishy to anyone else?

getting serious theranos vibes from this

I’m just wondering when people are going to realize sticking your body into water being vibrated with ultrasound isn’t a good idea?

I used to have ultrasonic cleaner for jewelry and one of the things advised is to not put your hand in the water when it’s vibrating as it can be bad for your bones.

The new scanning technique is very fancy, but it sounds like people might be better of with boring full body visual imaging to check for skin cancer. If they want an AI angle to that, Midjourney could easily make a digital twin from the scan.