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.
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.
In the video David says he's building it just because he wants to. It really sounds like his own passion project. No investors. It's a nice position to be in.
Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.
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
If you watch the video, the original prototype had hand built piezoelectic array, which was a complete pain and nowhere near as good as the current revision. This one uses COTS hardware, just lots (40+) of them.
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.
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.
I dont understand though, why you have to simultanously do this from all sides- have the ultrasound swim around with the patient? Takes out the comlexity?
Or use boundary layers to keep the sound on the slice? Turn this cocktail glass full of patient into a tequila sunrise?
I don’t know if you’re joking, but liquid breathing has only really been tested on rats, like famously the one from The Abyss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss, which died a couple of days later.
Not being able to image inside the lungs is probably only a minor limitation really. There's also inside the head, and inside the rib cage is going to be awkward too due to bones.
Also ultrasound just isn't that good of an imaging technology, even with full aperture.
That said, it's non-ionising and if they can make this reasonably cheap (big if), then it's better than nothing at all. Probably decent for finding cancer, especially breast cancer (no pesky bones there!).
True, but ultrasound isn't entirely benign. Depending on what frequency and what power it can crack solid parts of the body (its used to break up kidney/gall stones) it also can heat things up (which is, assuming my understanding is correct, why doppler scans for blood flow are not done on <18 week pregancy)
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.
[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110
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.
Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.
A cynical view is it's all about $$$$.
Either way it's great HN content!
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.
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.
I dont understand though, why you have to simultanously do this from all sides- have the ultrasound swim around with the patient? Takes out the comlexity?
Or use boundary layers to keep the sound on the slice? Turn this cocktail glass full of patient into a tequila sunrise?
Also ultrasound just isn't that good of an imaging technology, even with full aperture.
That said, it's non-ionising and if they can make this reasonably cheap (big if), then it's better than nothing at all. Probably decent for finding cancer, especially breast cancer (no pesky bones there!).
True, but ultrasound isn't entirely benign. Depending on what frequency and what power it can crack solid parts of the body (its used to break up kidney/gall stones) it also can heat things up (which is, assuming my understanding is correct, why doppler scans for blood flow are not done on <18 week pregancy)
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.