I understand there are many benign tumors that doctors prefer to ignore in people, but eventually when scanning becomes portable and safe enough having regular access to scans could really help a lot of conditions.
Full body scanning is expensive, and in some cases not that higher resolution. CT full body scans are cheap and high resolution, but you are being blasted with Xrays for long periods. So there is a not inconsiderable health implication.
To get good data, ideally you need to have a longitudinal study, as in you measure people monthly/weekly and then correlate that to life outcomes. The ethical issue is that you'll see lots of lumps and bumps growing, and this could lead to lots of invasive checks. You can't not check because that's not fair "here is something that looks like cancer, if we grab it now it will stop you needing chemo. But it could just be a cyst."
So, its really really expensive to have 100k people getting monthly full body MRIs for 10+ years. Even more expensive to get them at the right resolution.
I think, that if these scanners are good and that is _Very much_ not proven. Then having a long term study would be good. I however have deep misgivings about how effective field array ultrasonic scans are, also safety.
I also do not trust midjourney, a company that exists through large scale copyright infringement to handle that data safely, ethically or in a way that would allow decent science to be done from it.
Finding "lumps and bumps" or incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI, maybe your doctor would want a follow up MRI as a closer look but if it seems likely benign they could easily recommend you to just keep scanning with this ultrasound machine and only get another MRI or biopsy if it seems to develop in a malignant way.
The mistrust of private individuals and companies is a harmful belief when it comes to the development of new medical technology. Many groundbreaking devices were developed through the efforts of individuals, including the MRI.
the full body MRI was developed in the NHS/university along with CT scanners. But let us not pretend that modern companies have been acting in a way that is ethical. OR that there exists a legal framework that fights for the rights of normal people.
> incidentalomas may be much less of a problem if you can keep a close eye on them without using CT or MRI
They are a problem because we have no real data on cancer incidents that don't develop. (https://ima.org.uk/24626/making-sense-of-cancer-with-profess... buried in this article)
Biopsies are not risk free. General anaesthetic carries a risk. You'll be on antibiotics, the wound will have an infection risk. Also the build up of scar tissue is a real issue.
This is the ethical issue. Because suspicious lumps will need investigation, no ethics board is going to allow not investigating.
This also fucks up the data.
Its not impossible, but it needs sensible thought, thought from actual medical professionals, rather than a company who is at best operating in a legal grey zone.
The problem is that, in clinical practice, with every imaging technology there are trade-offs. Just because we see something out of the ordinary in a scan doesn't immediately tell us whether it's pathology, pathology worth investigating/treating, or if it's just a normal physiological variation.
Which means that, when "something" is seen on a scan, we must do further testing, either increasingly invasive, or increasingly time consuming and expensive.
I agree with the sentiment that if we had a way cheap, fast, and harmless way to scan an entire body we would unlock many new research areas and that it would further our medical understanding, and eventually ripen for clinical use.
However currently, I do not see any benefit in giving access to the population to such a technology, because we neither have the resources to chase down every single region of interest in a scan, nor do we have efficacious treatments for everything we might come across on a scan. Which is why we've settled on scanning things if there are other signs of disease, and only treating something when it significantly impairs life quality and/or expectancy.
Should such a quick and easy scan be in every hospital and research center? Yes. Should it be a spa for people to go to whenever they feel like? No.
we don't need to do much differently to take advantage of this data anyway. doctors already ask patients what changed recently
collect data passively. when a medical condition arises, you have a data source to correlate against the onset of the condition
currently we have almost no data, so doctors need to run multiple tests to identify possible causes
So your take is we just do the testing and ignore it's outputs entirely, until something comes up? And that is somehow different and better than current imaging processes?
> currently we have almost no data
This is absolute fucking nonsense.
Indeed, but having more data might be able to solve that? The whole problem seems to be that benign conditions sometimes look scary because we're currently not able to predict well enough whether it's something that will eventually cause problems.
If I could have daily full 3d body scans, and time lapse healing, track injury progress, visualize and correlate food and exercise.
And all I have to do is chill out about known benign cysts and tumors.
Yes I think it will help. I would take that trade off.
I already can feel a few cysts that have been with me for a long time, docs said I was fine, so I've already been through the stressful initiation of benign lumps.
Further, as someone that has spent far too much time and money trying to find the root cause of a particular issue (with absurdly frustrating inefficiencies in terms of being bounced around, insurance nonsense, etc), I am generally in favor of improving our ability to find a lot of information in a manner like this. Doctors are generally good at finding very common issues they see all the time, much worse at anything uncommon. This can be a real problem. I think it could help the world a lot if we had something like this to improve our understanding of more outlier cases, we might find a lot of issues that were hard to catch without that scale of information. I also think preemptive scanning would catch a lot of issues that go otherwise unnoticed for much longer than they should go, something that also happened to me, but is mostly an issue of systemic inefficiencies in our current healthcare system rather than something that this technology is required to solve. In my case, doing some simple checks that they felt weren't necessary because I seemed healthy would've caught it much earlier.
Was this presented as an opportunity for researchers to be able to run more large scale studies involving full scans I woukd have a different take. This is however presented as a shiny toy to be put in a spa, that gives you images you don't know how to interpret anyway, or at best gives you some AI-powered report.
The rest that you're saying points more to issues of you country's Healthcare system, and it isn't clear if and how this technology would improve that.
Fast and cheap full body scans could provide the data necessary to tune out the noise.
Instead of looking at a single snapshot of a person, you're now looking at trends over time. We probably don't have the analytical tools to effectively evaluate medical imaging with that time dimension at such scale (because I assume it would be rare for someone to get MRIs so frequently), but maybe with more data and study, we'll be able to more definitively distinguish benign quirks from real concerns.
Rather than a human comparing a couple of scans five years apart, you're talking about computationally identifying outlying regions in the data (a motion picture of the entire body) that are trending towards areas of concern.
https://www.wiserhealthcare.org.au/too-much-of-a-good-thing-...
> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
the signal is improved by focusing on differences over time, instead of looking for insight from a single snapshot
in a production system, I look at the change log around incident start as one high signal way to diagnose the problem
I want the same ability with my own body. new pain? look for recent scan deltas, in conjunction with modern medical intuition
Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?
“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.
Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.
Something unusual in a single one-off scan vs something unusual and changing over the course of multiple scans give two different views.
People are already doing this monthly with DEXA scans!
Actually in some cases we do know. Regular xrays are harmful, for example.
Our medical industry is set up to only evolve via highly centralized research that fully situates a diagnostic within a particular treatment path. This approach makes it more and more expensive to improve care for narrower and narrower populations - driving medicine towards being a luxury good.
I'd like to see midjourney say more about price, but I love the idea of starting some new diagnostic pathways with different principles. There are probably all sorts of low hanging fruit to be found about new treatment strategies... It just takes some faith that nature hasn't hidden all of her secrets in the one place we already know how to look.
It shouldn't be a commodified test anyone can do at any time they feel like it. There are so many examples this leading to over or misdiagnosing already. I've seen patients who thought they had diabetes because they got a CGM over the counter and it showed a blood sugar spike during exercise (as in, their body doing exactly what it was supposed to do). He also now avoids oatmeal because "it spikes my blood sugar". Surprise: reddit and tiktok are awash with such stories as well.
I've seen a patient who on a whim decided to get 24hr blood pressure monitoring done, and thought they have severe hypertension because their systolic reached 170 when they were climbing stairs and during a football match because they were cheering and shouting.
In a similar vein, there are shady practicians who offer full body MRI scans, and fMRI brain scans to the well-to-do as a way of diagnosing things, when in fact neither are specific enough to actually diagnose something on their own.
23andme tests sending patients into clinics because they found a specific SNP that may be associated with worse outcomes for a disease.
We have neither the resources nor a specific enough technology (scan shows something: not specific enough to tell us what it is, but it sure is something) to unleash these for the general population to use.
Anecdote: My wife had a high risk pregnancy. They did more than the usual scans and tests, and at one point we were told to go immediately to the NICU, spent 48h there , more tests. None of the tests really showed anything other than she was different than the normal pregnancy (I won't get into the specifics).
In the end, we have a healthy child but it was a lot of pain just going through test after test just because things were out of bands (my words).
I'm in full favour of learning better and better tests. Over time we'll have enough data to know what's urgent and what's preventative. Losing friends and family to avoidable health issues is too heartbreaking.