For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
I mean, with that much data, you may be able to understand under what timeframe a tumor is actually of concern. What's so bad about having some false positives?
Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.
It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.
What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?
Medical imaging is literally the last of the last places where you want to hallucinate a tiny little blob.
Where's your sense of fun and adventure? /s
It looks like a legit attempt. Wow. This is insanely innovative.
I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?
I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.
2,592,000 seconds / 20,000 scans = 129.6 seconds/scan
If you really hate your customers and don't care about cleaning out the tanks between scans, you could make this work. They have to be either able bodied to be able to move in and out quickly enough, or if they're not you just toss them unceremoniously onto the platform and drag them off after.
Realistically, a 60 second scan is going to take ~10 mins minimum, and will operate 8 hours a day, let's say charitably 7 days a week. Assume 50% utilisation due to staffing, repair, holidays, etc, we're looking at ~36m a month, or 0.036% of what is being pitched here. (8hrs * 6 scans * 30 days * 0.5 utilisation * 50k machines).
Sounds good to me.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?
What there isn't is good evidence that these full body scans actually improve outcomes.
> We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
As far as I understand ultrasound there's no reason you couldn't do this, it's just infeasible to do a full body scan with a hand probe and you get covered in goop.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?
But, even granting they could be true, they would be true under the status quo.
Sure, a one off full body scan might be scary and lead to unnecessary action. But if a technology of the sort being described here were to exist, you would just get daily (or more frequent) scans to monitor the situation. Is that tumor actually growing or is it just a transient thing your immune system is dealing with? Way easier to tell if imaging is cheap, fast, and frequent.
And then there is the data.
No one knows what is actually going on in our bodies. If we had the ability to do billions of scans, imagine the longitudinal studies that could be performed.
It would radically alter medicine.
- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.
Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.
US is a good diagnostic tool, but it can be challenging to read because obtaining good images is very operator dependent. You need to have a good sonographer that can get the right views, knows how to adjust the imaging parameters to produce high quality images. It's not like CT or MR where the tech just sets a few basic scanning parameters and let the machine do its job.
However, see my other comment, the example images they provide on the page do not look great, very limited organ detail.
edit: clarification
Given the source, I will treat it as nonsense science fiction until it’s built, functional and scientifically tested.
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
[0] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/midjourney-revenue-...
So im curious to know the limitations of this device
Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.
Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.
Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.
On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.
EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.
my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?
Is this some AI hallucination post?
There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.
What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.
The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.
So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.
For sure, we have to be realistic about what processes will systematically have error, and if we can't stop a doctor from doing bad things with a piece of data we should shield them from it, but the tools to make scalable, calibrated risk estimates based on large data dumps is getting better every year.
The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.
> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.
> What This Leads To
> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.
There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.
There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.
What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.
I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.
...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?
Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?
Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
Um, that's still a tumor.
I think this is currently seen as too expensive to do for people who have lower risk, but I mention it as an example of something that one could check for more routinely given much cheaper ultrasound scans.
Prophylactic ultrasound exams are also apparently much more plausible on medical cost/benefit than prophylactic CT exams, because the CT exams very slightly increase one's cancer risk (https://xkcd.com/radiation/), where ultrasound doesn't.
(At a friend's doctor's suggestion, I started taking alkali citrate supplements and switched from almond milk to oat milk; I now apparently rarely get kidney stones.)
We are well on our way to that classic scifi trope of the villian being introduced as they soak a special tub of goop. (Dune, GOTG, Star Wars)
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
That's about 1 scan per unit, every 2 minutes, 24/7.
Hopefully it doesn’t become Gattaca.
Early detection of disease, as well as every kind of physical issue with the body you can imagine.
The incredulity of the question seems rooted in the medical culture of our current time. It's easy to imagine a science fiction future where scans happen not every 9 months, but daily, in your home, and the idea of not constantly checking your full body would be as strange as not brushing your teeth is to us...
I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.
What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?
There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.
The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.
You're not arguing in good faith when you equate those.
> The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.
Maybe your employer pays for you to get a more comprehensive checkup by default and you're unaware of this?
But the ones vast majority of population here gets do not include MRI or CT or Endoscopy.
And, _even then_; specific checkups when you're looking for _specific things_ are still very different things than a full-body MRIs.
My wife's a cardiologist and hypochondriacs with smartwatches have become a frequent occurrence because healthy young people despite regular check ups have convinced themselves their watch telling them their pulse got high that one time must mean they're dying and they'll show up not one but five times.
The same is happening with so called "sleep optimizations" which themselves can produce insomnia as people start to self-monitor and enact sleep efforts.
The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.
It is a problem because there's evidence based standards for when examinations are indicated and prolong or improve a person's life. You being extremely concerned doesn't move that needle and subjecting you to tests simply because you're anxious is blatantly unethical and harmful to your psychological wellbeing.
And nope this isn't censorship, it's being mathematically literate and understanding how data production works. Here's an actual real world example. There are aids tests that are 99% accurate. About 30 in 1000 people in the US have AIDS. 99/1 is great odds, let's test everyone, data doesn't hurt right? Except as it turns out if you test a thousand people randomly you'll have 10 false positives and 3 people with AIDS, Bayes in action.
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
Umm...the same use we get out of an annual physical or dental checkup.
What do you mean here?
The idea came from LLMs? They built this with LLMs?
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Never underestimate the audacity of a software engineer with a new toy
> It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.
Well, if you replace LeBron with Jordan, and Bowling with Baseball ..
The resolution of typical DICOM images is much less than what they're saying they are actually capturing, so the reconstructed images they're showing are just terrible for no good reason.
But I suspect there is a bigger fundamental physics issue with this entire thing... I'm not convinced they can penetrate fully inside and all the way around a human with only non-ionizing energy, especially from that far away.
because dang or whoever the fuck runs this forum didn't ban politics 10 years ago and now this place is an orange reddit.
This community can be much better than that.
Remember, commercialization isn't the goal. They don't need to make a profit, as a company, they just need to get people to invest in their company and not get charged with fraud for something along the way.
I could imagine this getting cheap enough that your local gym has one and you get checked once every 3 months.
Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.
Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.
ricochet11•1h ago
busymom0•1h ago
EDIT: Actually looks like their announcement has another page linked for more details containing this video.