The baby MRI: shrinking tech to help save newborn lives | Hacker News Reader

The baby MRI: shrinking tech to help save newborn lives

mosaicscience.com

51 pointsangrymouse30 comments

Nice long-form advertisement from GE. Since NHS is taxpayer-funded, you have to sell the general public on a new million dollar MRI machine of questionable clinical utility. Especially since there are other MRI machines in the same hospital that do the same exact thing.

In the US, many states require hospitals to file a "Certificate of Need" before they're allowed to buy a new MRI (or operate a helicopter ambulance service, etc). The reasoning is to prevent overlapping service and reduce costs. But really it reduces resiliency and availability -- if the lone machine in the county is down for repairs, you don't want to be transporting a patient across the state to get a scan done.

Edit: Found list of states with CON laws: http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need-...

Gross. Why would I invest R&D into building a dramatically cheaper MRI if I can't make it up on volume?

You raise the price to cover the lack of sales volume and spread your fixed costs over fewer machines.

I'm not saying every Walgreen's & CVS pharmacy in the country should have one, but it wouldn't be hard to imagine the "Quick-Med" places having them.

CON laws are somewhat unfortunate when applied badly, yes, but they don't seem to apply here, which describes GE marketing a MRI machine to hospitals that already have one, so that they don't have to transport patients between floors.

Wait - you mean if I start a private hospital, funded privately, owned privately, I might not be able to buy (whatever medical doo-dads I want) for that hospital ?

You might not even be able to open an emergency department or maternity ward if there is one "close enough" according to the state regulators.

So the solution to high medical costs is limiting the supply?

I guess if it works for rent, it'll work for medicine. </s>

Ironically, the states without CON laws help those that do have them, by allowing increased sales and thus lowering the unit costs.

This is great great news for my family, thanks angrymouse!

Deleted because of downvotes instead of discussing it.

In what sense?

Saving small lives that couldn't be saved other wise. When they have children, what are the odds for more trouble during pregnancy and more emotional pain.

This is historically a very dangerous idea on its own, but even ignoring that, please read the article, or even just the subtitle. This is about babies born prematurely, which often has nothing to do with genetics.

When they have children, what are the odds for more trouble during pregnancy and more emotional pain.

Medical science moves at a pretty impressive pace, so whatever the odds are now it'll probably be considerably lower in 20 to 30 years time.

Spoiler alert: you owe your own life directly to advances in medicine too.

The notion that only the "inferior" have a need of these advancements is imbecillic.

  "When they have children, what are the odds for more trouble during pregnancy and more emotional pain."

What scientific evidence that these odds are significantly different than the general population are you basing your thinking on?

Why apply this only to newborns? Surely the argument translates to many other forms of treatment.

Finally, are you really prepared to stake a strong claim that reproductive success is a dominant metric of future worth?

I guess a "Darwinian" idea that babies who need an MRI to live are genetically inferior, and keeping them alive would weaken our species? Doesn't really make sense, but I don't know how else to interpret that comment.

What an interesting take away. This is why I like online forums, because I would have never expected such a response.

For better or worse, I read the headline and hoped someone had made some progress that would make those dealing with ill babies, lives just a little easier.

Not much people are thinking like you. Received 10 downvotes in 2 minutes :)

I don't understand. If it was deleted, how am I reading it?

They edited their comment to remove controversial remarks.

I'm inferring what you said from replies, but I think your concern can be applied to pretty much all medical care.

If we vaccinate -> mutants with natural resistance have to compete with the susceptible.

Antibiotics -> People with strong immune systems and good hygiene have to compete with dirty weaklings.

Treatment of heart disease -> people with bad habits and bad genetics live longer, gather more resources for their descendants.

And on and on.

(Of course I'm being a little sarcastic above but I certainly don't mean to mock those that benefit greatly from medical intervention, I'm one of them)

You guessed right.i had a similar comment when they wanted all diseases out of the world.. Nobody will have a natural immune system and 1 variant could show up and it could go really fast then. :)

I think this situation is a little different and more complex than the examples you're comparing. I've worked in a NICU, and I've seen that many of the babies in it stay for several months at a time. Keeping these babies alive can be extremely expensive, and while considering costs in these situations is ugly, it is something that we have to do. Along with the costs, we have to consider the outcomes for these babies. We've only been able to keep babies born at ~20 weeks alive for a short time in medical history - we don't have a great idea about the long term outcome for them. We know that many of these babies are still alive, but we also know that many of them die very young from complications of pre-maturity like underdeveloped lungs, brain hemorrhage, necrosis of the GI tract, congenital heart defects, and sepsis.

The right thing to do isn't clear cut in this situation. Going to great lengths to save or prolong every baby's life isn't clearly a good thing, but neither is refusing care for premature babies.

True, but I think this is actually what an MRI can help with. If you can see soon after birth that a baby has suffered serious brain damage, you can avoid getting the parents' hopes up, just to have them crushed later.

Eyeglasses -> Us nearsighted spread our dirty genes.

I get the gist of what your comment must have been from the replies. It's a controversial idea, but one the medical community wrestles with all the time. Perhaps it was the way you communicated it, but I have heard many nurses and doctors ask, "At what point are heroic measures to save a life going too far?"

I think many people, myself included, see an MRI as a fairly benign, despite the radiation damage. If we are considering this in Darwinian terms, then pretty much any medical procedure is weakening the species. Fertilization procedures are birthing children who will one day also need fertilization procedures.

But then, aren't we all genetically weak at this point? Don't we all need technology to survive? Take away the tech, and I think 99% of us die in a month. It's true we are getting weaker, but we are locked in. Civilization is now a race between our weakening bloodlines and our ability to compensate for it with technology.

MRIs don't cause radiation damage, unlike something like a CT scan or xray.

You're right. I got my tests confused.

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