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Comment by sberens | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!

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It seems like the radiology equivalent to a blood testing machine that could be deployed to walgreens and detect 100 diseases with a finger prick.

But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors

True, but on the other hand they have an actual prototype and they don't seem to be going around charming VCs... also, I didn't see anywhere they claimed to be able to diagnose or discover any disease.

So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.

Not hating, but there's no way resolution gets as good as MRI with ultrasound computed tomography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography). Doing something like searching for room-temperature semiconductors so that MRI scanners are much cheaper to operate would be a more worthy goal.

There are many labs searching for room-temp superconductors. It's a research area with unknown results.

This project seems doable (just with a ton of data). Not sure about MRI level resolution, but CT is definitely not MRI level resolution but still extremely useful.

Ultrasonic imaging is definitely not novel. And it requires you tolerate being fully submerged. And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet.

As a consumer health device, we haven't even gotten the population at large to wear biometrics and the CGM fad is over. Full body scans that cannot be used by a physician are not generally useful. If they aren't targeting FDA approval right off the bat, they are wasting their time. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry

> Except now you are soaking wet.

Oh no, how terrible! I have to use a towel and dry out like when taking a bath or shower...

Now, I have no idea whether this promotional video has any substance behind it, or whether 3D-reconstructed ultrasonic scans are usable by physicians right now. But, come on, your complaint is about getting wet?

Cats need not apply.

> And all you get is an image that is the SAME quality as an MRI. Except now you are soaking wet. This is not solving any current problem in healthcare- you can get an MRI for $2K cash out of pocket and you get to keep your clothes dry

So, an MRI quality image for less than $2000 and the downside is that you have to use a towel afterwards, and that's not solving a problem?

what's the novelty? mixing healthcare together with a spa is an idea older than Christ. USCT is decades old.

Their butterfly chips might be cool, but it's not like the article says anything about that. There's only one other comment in the whole thread that even mentions it.

I find using tens of thousands of ultrasonic chips, submerged underwater to provide you a radiation free full body scan, all while processing a petabyte of data per scan a pretty ambitious and cool project. I hope they make it work.

1 petabyte per 60 second scans implies a kind of comical data rate to storage, even at RAM speeds that’s implausible. Imagine we need to write these to hard drives, they happily sustain 150Mb/s on the high end, which would imply you’d need 115,000 hard drives to absorb that amount of writes. Even with top end NVMe drives you’d need a thousand of them writing simultaneously.

There's probably compute done on ram to reduce the file size before it hits disk. Definitely going to be redundant information in the scan.

You’re completely right, this is why currently ultrasound reconstruction happens on FPGAs. They would need a lot of them given the number of transducers. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6057541/

That's likely the datarate of the ADC chips. You would downsample them directly on the FPGA board and maybe perform an FFT or similar transform. 16 TB/s across a few dozen FPGA boards is nothing crazy. After some early stages in the signal processing you might transfer 1 or 2 TB/s over ethernet to the servers. Entirely feasible considering we have 800 gigabit/s ethernet.

How old are you? I've been conned all my life by tech companies selling us "deliverance from work", "permanent Mars bases", "asteroid mining", "AR/VR everywhere, for everyone, all the time", "crypto will replace money", "3d TVs are the new hot shit", "self driving cars for everyone in 2 years tops"

I don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?

Yeah - this is the truth. I roll my eyes at nearly every "technology breakthrough" headline I see, and specially those involving medical technology. It almost never turns out to be true. Just last week, there were two separate cures for cancer that hit the HN front page. All hype and bullshit, of course. This piece from Midjourney starts off with patients wading into a "golden pool of light". If that doesn't set off your bullshit detector, I don't know what will. This is not how serious people talk about serious medical advances.

>I don't understand how people are so gullible? How do they keep falling for it?

As they say there is a new sucker born every minute.

(You already alluded to it when you asked the person's age)

I think I hate any single product announcement that involves "We have nothing, but we'll have something next year, and then we'll have 50k locations worldwide just two years later!"

In my opinion the issue is that many (maybe most) people who've heard of Midjourney associate the brand with AI slop imagery. Whether that reputation is fair or not is beside the point.

Totally agree.

This community can be much better than that.

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