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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

> My real anger is that we have found it possible to fund and implement this level of screening, at massive monetary, human and privacy cost, but I can't go to my doctor and ... get a body scan that does all the 3d segmentation, recognition, etc

Airport screening of people doesn't yield those results. It's able to notice a big inorganic mass, or a chunk of metal, but it wouldn't spot a tumour, it gives nowhere near the level of detail that an MRI or CAT scan will give. The airport scanners are also much cheaper, coming in at ~250k USD rather than ~2m USD.

Even the xray machines used for bags, while expensive and capable, are designed to differentiate metals, liquids, and organics, not organics from other organics.

Both airport security and healthcare funding have their issues, but I don't think this is one of them.

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I think the OP was lamenting the overall effort and resources that could have been applied to something more effective at helping people, such as improving the medical industry, not suggesting that airport screening equipment could be used for medical purposes.

I think the point is we can afford massive machines for the TSA that are essentially paid for by the Federal Budget, and used by millions each day for free, but we can't do the same for MRI machines.

Lots of stuff is funded by the US federal budget instead of MRI machines.

My point is that there's not actually any useful connection between the TSA scanners and medical scanners, it's comparing apples to oranges. By all means be angry about the lack of healthcare in the US, by all means blame other spending, but singling out the TSA is arbitrary.

Most of the other spending serves a useful purpose. TSA doesn't. Though they seem relatively benign next to the Gesta..I mean ICE

As I said, it's fine if you want a political opinion on government spending priorities, but that's not what jmward01 appeared to be suggesting.

I think it was, his phrasing was just somewhat ambiguous

I think an MRI probably takes longer than the TSA scan so walk-through MRIs wouldn’t be practical.

There are an order of magnitude less MRI scans daily than US flight passengers, however, at 1/30th the frequency.

Granted, I imagine an MRI scan still takes longer than 30 airport scans.

Interestingly the price of the body scanners and a typical MRI are in the same ballpark, from my experience and what I could glean online.

I’m sure we do have a lot more MRI machines than airport scanners, right?

Nobody or no item is getting an MRI at an airport. It's pretty common for people to conflate that with X-rays but MRIs work on a fundamentally different process and exclusively (outside of physics 101) requires liquid helium-cooled superconducting magnets to get anything useful.

Not free. If you look at an itemized statement for air travel you’ll see that you’re paying the TSA for this treatment directly.

Not really relevant, just makes the whole thing worse imho. There are new carryon bag scanners which are basically CT scans I think. Again not really relevant just makes it all worse. We could afford better medical care but we spending it on security theater and power tripping.

Not that your thrust is incorrect, but a CT machine (used here at airports) and MRI machines are completely different beasts in not just cost but also complexity.

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