Facebook and Oculus exec leaving to work on wearable MRI | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Oculus exec leaving to work on wearable MRI

digitaltrends.com

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> Jepsen, whose background and resume could leave most people gasping, is one of tech’s true, long-haul, entrepreneurial visionaries.

AFAICT, Jepsen has been more of a seagull [1] than anything. The reality is... she's been a high profile participant in a series of short-term, failed endeavors -- from OLPC, Pixel Qi, a failed Google[x] project, and now a very short stint at FB. All of these failings are well documented on Wikipedia [2]. They sound good in principle, but have never delivered.

The MRI goal is laudable, and I hope for humanity's sake that it works. But I'd hold off on the admiration until it's more than vaporware -- especially with Jepsen at the helm.

Throw away account since I'm too close to her past endeavors to speak publicly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_manager

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen

So, in your estimation, what's an acceptable success rate for someone who only really works on moon shot ideas? I'm curious why you think she's a bellwether for failure as opposed to someone who is driven to take on world changing ideas.

If you're only going to say "I'm too close to her" and call her some bad things with an anon account, well, you probably just shouldn't have posted. I'm all for learning from the experiences people have interacting with the technocrati, but this post feels petty and lacks information.

"once, you're lucky. twice, you're good" could be a reasonable metric for execs who take on high risk projects.

I'd like to dismiss this as a little bit of jealous gossip, but the more I read the more it fits. Not to say the things she's done haven't been impressive but she seems like a person better at winning awards and having fanciful features written about her than creating really wide reaching impact. Many of these projects really strike me as a feel-good ideas that are much more beautiful to the wide-eyed technologist futurist types, than to the intended markets / consumers / world at large.

But yeah, I'd like nothing more than to be wrong on this. All of these ideas, if true to their promises would indeed be worth the "visionary" labels.

Reminded me of a couple of quotes from the book "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat":

The maximum rate of promotion is achieved at a level of crisis only slightly less than that which results in dismissal

and

Innovative organizations abhor little failures but reward big ones

That's satire, of course, but makes sense. After some basic competence requirements are met, there is no way to figure out whether a moonshot project failed because it is inherently hard or as a consequence of the manager's incompetence. Manager of the failed moonshot thus becomes a very desirable hire - at least he or she has valuable experience in tackling hard projects!

They failed economically, though, not technically.

Current MRIs need liquid helium to keep their electromagnets superconducting. Short of room-temperature superconductors... how are they planning to pull this off?

Screw wearability, being able to make an MRI machine smaller than a small car that doesn't need helium would be worth $$$ on its own.

There are a number of machines that don't use superconducting magnets and hence don't have such stringent cooling needs. These machines typically need these sort of cooling setups to support higher fields but imaging is still possible at low field. Some years ago, and I'm by no means up to date with this, there was a group working on imaging using the earth's magnetic field as the main field [1]. While this is the extreme MRI has been functional longer than superconducting magnets have been feasible.

On the flip side of this things like compressed sensing and MRI fingerprinting [2] reduce further the need for a traditional 'full' scan. We are still some way off seeing these sorts of things in clinical MRI but that may be more attributable to the pace at which companies like GE and Phillips move in this space. That and the sheer cost of R&D.

Overall it is a pretty exciting time to be in MRI, despite the outside view being that it has changed very little in recent decades.

disclosure: PhD candidate in electrical engineering, focused on MRI

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16828566 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4376817/

Cool! Will this mean MRIs take less time in the future? If so, any sense for how much less? I imagine it'd be more routine and give more people accurate diagnostics if it took 5-10 minutes instead of 45 to get a scan.

That's the hope. A little outside my field but current compressed sensing in MRI research is looking at reduction factors of about 2-8 (typically 2, 4, or 8 from tradition) in compressed sensing. This is still pretty rare in commercial machines though.

Some sequences such as EPI [1] can get images very fast (200ms) with a trade off in spatial resolution. This is for things like cardiac imaging where low resolution images of the heard every 200ms are more useful than a single high resolution image. Also for moving parts of the body there is often blurring artefacts due to movement within the image window using longer sequence types.

Unfortunately I think the biggest inhibitor of MRI being more common is still the price of a scan. Here in Australia it can be a few hundred dollars for a scan (and I understand it can be far more elsewhere). Again though if we had access to a cheaper option the idea of regular scans may not be too far off.

I like to imagine a point in the future where the sci-fi full body diagnostic scanning is a reality. Still a lot of work to get there but it is certainly getting closer.

[1] http://radiopaedia.org/articles/echo-planar-imaging-1

When I had an MRI on my knee in 2009, my out of pocket expense was $1500. A few hundred dollars seems cheap to me. Just the doctor visit to get the MRI ordered cost me $200.

That price really doesn't make a lot of sense. I find it hard to believe that it bears any meaningful relationship to the cost of the MRI machine or the cost of running it or analysing the results.

After all such an MRI takes only a few minutes of machine time. Let's be generous and say it takes an hour and that it is in use for only 10 hours a day 20 days a month. That means it turns over 300kUSD per month, 3.6MUSD per year.

You can probably buy one that would do the job for less than 500kUSD; see http://info.blockimaging.com/bid/92623/MRI-Machine-Cost-and-....

I think insurers have caught on nowadays, but MRI scanning used to be a major profit center for US hospitals because the cost of the machines had gone down but their prices kept going up. Probably still is if you have to pay list price.

Thank you for all this interesting information!

With your knowledge, would you consider MRI R&D to be as open for disruption like space technology was until a few years ago?

Do you think the same reductions in cost can be achieved by a group of similarly insanely smart people like those at SpaceX?

You're welcome, not often that MRI related posts come up so it is nice to share this side of what I do.

I think certainly there is room for it and I know there have been some recent entrants into the field which consider themselves MRI R&D. Up to this point though they are mostly bring quite secretive about what they are working on. I think though with the right funding and some smart cash behind a team that knows the space there is room to make big changes and drive price down competitively.

One example of a team in this space is Magnetica [1] who are working on smaller (physically) MRI systems for extremity imaging. (I know them through the university and my supervisor is CTO but I have no personal stake in the company otherwise)

There is 'the' MRI conference on this week in Singapore (ISMRM for those interested) which may result in some MRI related press in the coming days. Not sure where to look for it though as unfortunately the conference content is member only at this point.

[1]: http://magnetica.com/

Great answer, thank you. I find MRI related posts one of the most exciting - there is so much potential in the technology, especially as medicine moves from treatment of symptoms to prevention more and more. If there would only be more people working on this instead of social media apps...

I find it interesting to see that the trend in this space seems to move towards small MRI units. Do you know of similarly innovative companies that work on full-body MRI machines?

For me, the perfect business case (esp. in a country with a public health system) is having regular, accurate full-body scans that are checked by software for tissue changes. Early detection of some of the most deadly diseases would save insurances a tremendous amount of money and human beings from unquantifiable suffering. Are there any publications / blogs that you would recommend to stay up to date with MRI technology?

Hopefully speeding up image acquisition will also bring down cost. If you can reduce the acquisition time by a factor of 4, you should be able to make the scans at least 2 times less expensive, with correct management of the queue.

Acquisition is one cost but paying an expert radiologist to actually read the scan is another cost entirely. Decreased cost may increase use in cases where it's not necessary, which could reduce the mean throughput of the system.

How is the patent situation? Does a well funded startup have a chance to disrupt this field ?

Because if the potential were seeing in research on fmri neurofeedback for example does work, we might be talking about something that will make virtual reality look insignificant.

One example is accelerating mental learning processes that take experienced meditators decades(they call it enlightenment which leads to development of deeply happy and caring human beings ) into a period of weeks/months of a much less intense effort, so the experience may be available to everyone, not just a rare few.

MRI like a lot of other med tech is very heavily patented. The core tech has long since expired but any of the cutting edge work will probably have patents around it. I do believe that an MRI startup has a chance to disrupt but it may be more of an innovation in application, or accessibility than in pure technology.

>> innovation in accessibility

Do you mean business model innovation ?

Yeah essentially, I meant that in the sense of innovating how people access MRI scans and the data associated with them.

>How is the patent situation?

In the original Xconomy article[0], there's this quote:

“I could no longer wait. I’m still writing up the patents. But I am incredibly excited to strike off on this direction,” she says.

Doesn't answer your question of course, but the fact she's already writing patents is interesting.

[0] http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2016/05/06/mary-lou-jep...

Mary Lou Jepsen gave a talk about her ideas at the Media Lab 30th anniversary:

http://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/ml30-2015-10-30-03

Her talk starts at about 45:20.

Jepsen intends to build a "Diffuse Optical Tomography"[0] system using liquid crystals as a means of achieving both miniaturization as well as a dramatic increase in the emitter count. A beanie hat was used as a visualization of the final consumer-facing product.

Suffice it to say, there will probably be no use of low-field MR, nor anything like MEG—let alone both.[1][2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_optical_imaging

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoencephalography

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726102756.h...

I wonder how much of this is due to Oculus's clear lagging behind it competitors.

HTC and Sony both have platforms that a more robust and better positioned to capture gamers than Oculus.

I wouldn't want to stick around either.

I'm not so sure about that. Once the touch controllers start shipping out with the second camera, they will be equal if not better than the competition.

They are also researching inside out tracking for mobile VR which is very exciting!

What is inside out tracking? Is that like tracking the facial movements and such inside the headset to allow an accurate facial projection while wearing the headset?

Better. It's positional tracking using one or more cameras on the headset. No more external cameras, laser base stations, and limited tracking area.

The term inside-out tracking does not make any assertions about requiring fixed external reference points. The Vive is using inside-out tracking as well, since it utilizes photo diodes on the headset that interpret the external IR laser sweeps.

Have you used an HTC Vive?

I have a couple oculus and they are nowhere near the HTC Vive in terms of immersion.

You have access to Oculus touch? What makes Vive wands better for immersion compared to Oculus touch?

I've recently used both and think they're equal in terms of immersion when the Vive is roughly around the minimum space requirements. For gaming, I could take either; for non-gaming experiences, I haven't seen anything on the Vive that wouldn't feel similar on the Oculus or vice-versa.

If you have a large open space the Vive may pull ahead, but I haven't tried anything that could take advantage of that.

FWIW, I was sold on VR when I first tried DK1, but now having tried the consumer version and the Vive (years later), I'm even more excited.

I found the vive to be much more immersive, and the games being developed for it felt like they truly understood the capabilities of VR.

I'm really excited about the competition in the space, it is only going to be good for VR enthusiasts.

A couple of Oculus devices (dk1, dk2) or a couple of Rifts (without touch controllers)?

I did say that we will need to wait for the second camera + touch controllers for the Rift to be on par with the Vive.

> better positioned to capture gamers

If this generation of VR gets relegated to gaming then it should be considered a failure.

Immersive VR experiences outside of gaming are really really hard. AR has a much better chance of capturing the non-gamer market.

Agreed, VR is very anti-social. I have several oculus and there is no real viable use outside of game that I have used.

Screen replacement is a no go, way to much eyestrain.

In a few generations that could be alieviated though

Surprised to hear you say that. When I got my first oculus, I was struck by how much better it was for nongaming applications than gaming ones. Things like Giants of the Solar System, or tours around historical sites and events. Things like providing visualisation of designs that are yet to be built. Taking a small object and examining it closely in 3d at different scales. Education, training.

I actually think the gaming features of the current crop could end up being a niche use.

VR is not inherently anti-social. Applications like AltspaceVR are very social. Also, I've had groups of people at my home to try out the Vive while projecting the headset content to a wall, and it's always a very inclusive and social experience where HMD wearer and audience participate alike.

In terms of eyestrain, I think you may want to check the IPD setting on your headset (if you own one that supports it), since due to being focused at a farther distance than regular monitors, it should be (and is for me) quite a bit less straining on the eyes.

Resolution is still sub-par for screen replacement though.

Good AR is going to be a long way off. There are many technical challenges that aren't even close to being addressed yet.

Why? Surely gaming, an activity usually conducted alone that already involves buying hardware, is an ideal place for new hardware tech to gain traction.

True. But chances are once they go the gaming route, people will see it as just another toy and it will never escape from this deep pit of nerd-dom and into the hands of the average joe. See google glass, kinect etc. Not VR by any means but revolutionary for their time.

I think the undercurrent behind this is the new magnetorheological technologies now available...before, the solid state physics behind the magnets necessitates the huge size of the things...

Please would you elaborate on this? Or provide some sort of reference?

I think that it is more likely the exec is going to apply Augmented VR for viewing MRI imaging. So, 'wearable MRI' is somewhat Misinterpreted. I doubt it is an actual MRI scanner, just a novelty way of augmentation

But I suppose you've got to try to generate billions somehow :)

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