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Comment by jashephe | Hacker News Reader

Some of the comments here don't touch on the practical limitations of this, but here's one — I'm at a 1400+ bed top-10 US academic medical center, and even our outpatient MRI machines book patients until near-midnight because the scans take so long. I'm not sure if we even have the imaging capacity at this point to be scanning healthy people.

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This!

I got up at 4am to run scans in grad school because the even the research scanners were booked solid, never mind the clinical ones. Scanners are really expensive: the machine costs a lot, it needs fairly particular conditions (shielded room, cryogens), and trained operators and analysts.

There's maybe a market for fleecing the extremely wealthy into undergoing MRI fishing expeditions, but you'd have to charge a fortune if you're going to buy scanners to do it.

I work for a company that makes MRI machines. There is an industry wide push to reduce scan times. Even a 30 second or one minute reduction on scan time per protocol can translate into one or two more scans a day. Across a fleet of scanners, this can be millions of dollars a year in revenue.

There are hospitals that have switched brands of scanners over protocol times.

I don't know if they are high enough quality for a full body scan, but there are MRI places literally in strip malls now. Cash price for a back scan is ~$350.

Nations like Japan, China are pushing MRI resolution and speed, along with lowering the costs. Particularly because the average people getting older, thus diagnostics will reduce the cost of healthcare on the long run, on the scale of these countries.

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