Correlated events :)
replyThe team behind this post is (or at least was as of a few months ago) working with Midjourney.
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
replyThe damage done by Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos goes way further than just that company. There is a lot of distrust now in anything tech that touches on medical devices. Some of it is for good measure, some of it will prevent really cool stuff from happening.
replyExactly. The concept itself; a machine that can do a bunch of tests from a whole lot less blood would be amazing but anyone who wants to do this now is automatically "oh so like Theranos" and then not gonna give you money to do this PhD or post doc and do you figure out a way to do this? You can't raise money because everyone's gonna be thinking of Theranos.
replyIs Aleph an established entity with a track record that should lead us to trust this at face value? I couldn’t find any info on them and the site seems new
replyOof did a bit more digging: https://x.com/_marleyx/status/2070260772635312598
reply> None of us were ultrasound scientists before this. We worked backwards from a desire for brain interfaces and taught ourselves physics, ultrasound, electromagnetism.
Not to say it’s not interesting or neat, but the Silicon Valley approach to solving medical issues doesn’t have a good track record, let’s put it that way
What was impossible is the scale they claim to be targetting.
replyThe Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull.
replyThey used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles.
The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into everyone’s veins.
This scanner doesn't inject bubble contrast either. A nurse does it. Obviously a nurse could do that when you use the Midjourney scanner too...
replyAbsolutely, but it was claims about ultrasound in general
replyI think the more interesting angle is focused ultrasound which is proposed as a solution to a whole lot of diseases
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