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Comment by pcrh | Hacker News Reader

There's a risk of echos of Theranos here. A paper apparently describing this ultrasound approach has been uploaded to arXiv [0]. If so, the resolution demonstrated is nowhere near sufficient to detect small changes to anatomy, let alone monitor them over time. Future developments could obviously improve on that.

[0] “Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00110

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They don't make any specific claims about what conditions it will diagnose. At 16:30, he says they are only initially doing "body composition" because anything more would add 9+ months to the deployment timeline. I assume they mean they process the images to return an estimate of body fat/muscle mass. Which isn't difficult and it seems likely they could get the error bars pretty low just off estimating subq fat alone. He doesn't say the specific classification they received from the FDA, just that it is a class 2 medical device.

Just reliably estimating body fat and muscle mass could already sell well with high-class fitness studios. Those already offer those scales with handheld probes as a feature, and those contraptions are horribly inaccurate. With this you not only get accurate estimates, you can also attribute them to your body parts.

"This month you gained 5% muscles mass in your upper arms, but lost 3% in your core muscles" "Body fat in your upper thighs reduced by 10%. You are on track to reach your goal in 6 months". It might be expensive, but there would be plenty of customers willing to pay for that

Then they can work on getting price down and accuracy up, both of which seem to be goals for the future

Stay tuned for new versions of the scanner! Hopefully later this year. The physical limitations are still far beyond all the current implementations. We'll see how far we can push it. If it's not far enough to be useful then at least we tried :) but I'd be surprised if it isn't useful so that's why im betting our own money on it.

one of the lead paper authors (jinhua xu) works at midjourney, appears in the video, and comments specifically on how the midjourney approach is the next, significantly better-funded iteration of the paper approach

true, but he doesn't say if it will meet the threshold of 'useful'

If you watch the video, the original prototype had hand built piezoelectic array, which was a complete pain and nowhere near as good as the current revision. This one uses COTS hardware, just lots (40+) of them.

I have a similar feeling.

One the one hand its great that they are spending the time and money to do this, on the other hand I am _very_ suspicious of their motives.

Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult, getting an accurate, repeatable, high resolution picture is a lot harder, and state of the art.

my worry is two fold:

1) over promise and causing injury to desperate people who see smudges on scans and have invasive surgery only to find out that its a reflection/artefact

2) what are they doing with the data they collect, and how will it be used to make money.

I think the main issue is that there are "no good startups" any more. As soon as an innovation happens that might be worth something, your original CEO is replaced by someone driven entirely by money, rather than public good. Or they get bought out by a corp that only cares about maintaining a monopoly.

In the video David says he's building it just because he wants to. It really sounds like his own passion project. No investors. It's a nice position to be in.

Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.

A cynical view is it's all about $$$$.

Either way it's great HN content!

I should have made clear, my suspicions are not really around the engineers running this, its the people who are less motivated by the original cause that can see $$$ in it.

Thats the point right, most of us would, if given the chance, divert some funding to work on a passion project that could easily save lives. That I applaud and would love more people to be able to do.

We have no investors, we could pocket the money. We're choosing instead to spend it on projects like this <3

>Getting _a_ picture is not that difficult

Can't wait to read your papers and/or watch your videos where you show us :).

https://thepihut.com/products/ultrasonic-distance-unit-i-o-r...

as I said, an image is doable, there is opensource to do that: https://hackaday.io/project/159467-open-source-ultrasonic-ph...

accurate and repeatable is that hard bit.

There's one GIGANTIC difference between Midjourney and Theranos.

Midjourney's money is their own. They don't have to lick anyone's boots (or worse) just to put bread on the table.

Don't ever confuse actual innovators with low-tier VC scammers. Because of that, I'm massively bullish on them.

This definitely isn't another Theranos. Theranos claimed to have a blood test that didn't actually exist. This is "just" standard ultrasound but with a much wider aperture than normal. There's no new science, it's just engineering that nobody else has put the effort in to actually do.

It’s literally a little fun side project for them and it’s in no way attempting to make billions by manipulating results. They straight up show and tell the limitations of what they are doing. Theranos was a complete scam from the get go and lied all the way til the end. I don’t see a single similarity

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