alt Hacker NewsThere'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
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I have a similar feeling.
One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives.
Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art.
my worry is two fold:
1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have invasive surgery only to find out that its a reflection/artefact
2) what are they doing with the data they collect, and how will it be used to make money.
I think the main issue is that there are "no good startups" any more. As soon as an innovation happens that might be worth something, your original CEO is replaced by someone driven entirely by money, rather than public good. Or they get bought out by a corp that only cares about maintaining a monopoly.
one of the lead paper authors (jinhua xu) works at midjourney, appears in the video, and comments specifically on how the midjourney approach is the next, significantly better-funded iteration of the paper approach
It’s literally a little fun side project for them and it’s in no way attempting to make billions by manipulating results. They straight up show and tell the limitations of what they are doing. Theranos was a complete scam from the get go and lied all the way til the end. I don’t see a single similarity
This definitely isn't another Theranos. Theranos claimed to have a blood test that didn't actually exist. This is "just" standard ultrasound but with a much wider aperture than normal. There's no new science, it's just engineering that nobody else has put the effort in to actually do.
There's one GIGANTIC difference between Midjourney and Theranos.
Midjourney's money is their own. They don't have to lick anyone's boots (or worse) just to put bread on the table.
Don't ever confuse actual innovators with low-tier VC scammers. Because of that, I'm massively bullish on them.
They don't make any specific claims about what conditions it will diagnose. At 16:30, he says they are only initially doing "body composition" because anything more would add 9+ months to the deployment timeline. I assume they mean they process the images to return an estimate of body fat/muscle mass. Which isn't difficult and it seems likely they could get the error bars pretty low just off estimating subq fat alone. He doesn't say the specific classification they received from the FDA, just that it is a class 2 medical device.