Item — HN Reader

There’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.

In general, I think we should applaud this though.

Any genuine attempt to create novel medical technologies is probably a good thing (assuming they’re non-invasive and non-painful).

Unless it’s a Theranos situation, I think it’s a great thing to attempt, even if it fails. So many things we rely on today are the result of a successful attempt, but the failures were just as necessary for the eventual success.

That ambition is very positive to me.

2 comments

I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutions

Or maybe, because it's not really useful for much.

It's a Theranos situation.

>>That ambition is very positive to me.

...and this is why people fall for it. Every. Single. Time.

Literally everything they're saying is marketingslop gobbledegook. No studies, no papers, no doctors; just "500k transducers," and "30fps!" Anyone can wire that up. With a little cash, you might even be able to stream, record, and proccess it. Still means absolute diddly squat if you haven't compared it to other imaging or figured out how to train a radiologist to use it effectively or done trials for specific diagnostics or diseases.

They'll figure out if it does anything other than show you an animated cartoon xray of yourself later. After they have your money.

That is a pretty wild disparagement this early. A Theranos situation is one where fraud has been committed. Theranos itself would not have been a "Theranos situation" if, after making initial bold claims ("we're gonna do a full blood panel with a drop of your blood"), they had tried to make it work, failed, and then been upfront about that. But they committed fraud and the rest is history.

With regards to Midjourney Scanner, you have no evidence that any fraud is happening or is likely to happen with this device. AFAIK they haven't actually made strong claims about what this will be capable of in a medical context, so fraud would be quite hard at this stage anyway. As such, it seems unreasonable to expect them to already have done studies with doctors.

Right, but also a big part of the "Theranos situation" was a tech company coming out and saying "We've got this revolutionary medical technology that the multi-hundred billion dollar medical industry has overlooked but which a non-domain expert undergrad has been able to innovate", and then a bunch of people, crucially many people with domain experience said stuff like "this is likely fraud, testing companies have all tried to make pin-prick blood sampling work but the volumes are just way too low to get anything reliable out of them, these companies employ PHDs who've all spent decades trying to make testing better and more affordable because there's a lot of money at stake".

Those people generally got shouted down when Theranos was still the hot story in SV, and of course after everything came out suddenly everyone knew it was fishy all along, which is just absolute bullshit. I remember reading comments here on HN suggesting that people saying Theranos was fraud were motivated by misogyny, just absolutely infuriating stuff.

So now we have an AI company coming out with promises of a revolutionary leap forward in medical imaging, in terms of cost and information gathered, and they're not using some sort of revolutionary sensor that they've invented, all the "hard" engineering has been done by other companies that have been in this game for decades at this point and how have R&D staffs with deep knowledge and expertise, but who somehow lack the ability to take the next step, they're coming in with the software and automated interpretation, which is basically the "?" step in the underpants gnome business plan.

The real truth about stuff in the biology and the medical world is that its all insanely hard due to the complexity of the systems involved, and there are tons of skilled and smart people who dedicate their careers to moving this stuff forward. There are really no low-hanging fruits being ignored by "the establishment" waiting for an outsider AI company to come in and overturn the table. Progress is basically won by sweating it out at the lab bench and accumulating a bunch of hard-fought incremental wins over a decade or so. Its frustrating that Elizabeth Holmes is still in jail and yet we're all here forgetting every lesson we should have learned from the previous go-round.

There are very clearly capabilities in medical tech that have not been fully explored due to compute/cost constraints and gaps in innovation. "Really smart PhDs have worked on this and come up with nothing" is a very unconvincing argument – you could say that about huge swathes of technological development.

Very smart people were trying and failing to effectively split the atom before some very well-funded and well-placed individuals made it happen. Loads of very smart people were working on AI before Transformers were developed and made LLMs viable / intelligent enough for real work. People trying and failing to do something hard doesn't mean it is impossible, it just means they've found 10,000 ways to not make a lightbulb.

You can't compare it to other imaging technologies, train radiologists on it, or do trials for specific diagnostics until you've wired it up and built the device. If you demand that you do that before building the thing you can literally never create anything new.

A theranos situation is one where you're lying about what you have reason to believe the new device will do - saying it will do things that you have no reason to think are even plausible - that you have prototypes doing the thing even. Not one where you're merely experimenting with something new that might or might not pan out.

Name some other groundbreaking medical equipment that was brought about by VC funding, please.

da Vinci Surgical System, Zio Patch cardiac monitor, Butterfly iQ handheld ultrasound, Swoop portable MRI, Shockwave Intravascular Lithotripsy, CardioMEMS HF System, Tablo Hemodialysis System, MONARCH robotic bronchoscopy platform, Mako robotic-arm orthopedic surgery system.

Thanks to the Zio patch I was finally able to convince doctors I actually had a heart condition that I had been telling them I had for years. For about a decade they were telling me my irregular rhythm was due to anxiety.

What was it? Thyroid?

Which of those is groundbreaking? The Butterly handheld ultrasound is old technology in a new form factor with a bunch of trade offs. Useful in some situations, sure, but “groundbreaking”? Same with the Swoop portable MRI: existing technology, different form factor, big trade offs.

You’ve pretty much demonstrated the criticism is true, that all these grandiose claims made by VC backed medical device companies are… bunk. They made something smaller and shittier, yay?

butterfly and the swoop are both essentially useless too compared to their reference devices

I'm not sure the da Vinci Surgical System is a good example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4941968/

That looks like a 10 year old publication. Can anyone familiar with this technology speak to the current state?

Apart from THAT what have the Romans ever done for us?

actually i think the chatbot you consulted listed a bunch of stuff that is a pretty bad example of VC (deep capital markets) leading biotech innovation. Shockwave is a good example - HistoSonics is a much better example and was written about on HN. By comparison Intuitive has conclusively discovered that outcomes are more or less the same as non-teleoperated laparoscopic procedures, at least ones common enough to do a comparison.

First gut reaction: this is a made up list. But it checks out. verified

Thank you for dealing with yet another midwit.