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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

This is wild. Also if this becomes cheap enough for regular folks to buy I can see a lot of self diagnosis coming in. Then again, maybe that'll be good

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Good for what? How often do people need an ultrasound, and how much would it offload the existing medical whatnots? It would actually increase the load on the system, because people would be like "My ultrasound detected a thing, I need someone to look at it".

I’m not convinced self diagnosis will be a positive thing.

What these small, portable machines will support is a lot of pre-hospital medics, working in remote or austere environments, to carry these devices and use them effectively.

There are already courses available to teach exactly this:

https://corom.org/apus/

You're not allowed to buy these without an NPI number. And while ultrasound is relatively easy, it's still not really usable without some training. I think there have been some studies of training users to do ultrasound at home for a limited set of views, but it's not really a "pick it up and look around" sort of thing.

I doubt it. How can you image an organ at home when you're not even 100% sure exactly where that organ is? Or what it looks like on an ultrasound? And that's not even getting into knowing whether you're looking at them from the right angle for the images to be diagnostically useful.

Yeah - my experience of watching baby ultrasounds was that I had no idea what I was looking at until the technician told me. Maybe there's an occasional clear image of a head or nose or something, but the rest of the time it's just wobbling grey shapes. I can't imagine trying to do that myself - let alone looking at my own organs which are mostly just amorphous blobs, and trying to diagnose something.

I suspect the main cost in running a diagnostic scan is labour rather than capital - and these low cost ultrasound devices will only have an impact in the developed world if they go hand in hand with AI.

Obviously they'll make a huge difference in developing countries where labour is relatively cheap compared to equipment - but even then it'll still require trained professionals to operate.

> I suspect the main cost in running a diagnostic scan is labour rather than capital

Thank you! As an ultrasound tech myself, I got a little ruffled at how many people in this thread think my job is pretty easy.

A bit the same with infrared. About 10, 15 years ago, several startups came out with cheaper ir-cameras. Flir then came out with the first gen Lepton chip, lowered the price for a while, so they where cheeper than the competition, i think none of the startups survived. Now you pay again a much to high price for a thermal camera ..

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