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Comment by thaw13579

2 hours ago

Cool work and proof of concept, and very excited to see where this goes. However, I do think there is enough exaggeration and missing information here that it warrants some critical appraisal. What's really missing is a comparison and validation with any existing medical imaging tech. Whole brain, contrast-free neurovascular imaging is essentially solved with MRI, why not run a scan and compare? Ultrasound is of course portable and less expensive, but MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost for medical workflows, and low-field brain MRI is addressing the portability and cost issues to some extent. I guess they are pitching this as a wearable "telepathy" device, which I think appropriately differentiates their product, but of course, this wording also invokes a framing that "you won't / don't need to know how it works," which invites skepticism and a higher bar for validation in my view.

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thaw13579

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switchbak  2 hours ago

"MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost" - I live in one of those first-world countries, and our citizens regularly wait many months if not over a year to get a single MRI scan. Yes, it's not just an issue of the MRI but the entire medical system, but the point still stands. Were there machines that were one or more orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run - I think we would see a marked increase in availability.

I agree on your ground-truth desire, and I would hope they've done a lot of that to validate what we see here.

  • thaw13579  2 hours ago

    I completely agree that's an issue, although more of an economic / public health policy issue than a technical one. There are low field MRI systems, such as the one made by Hyperfine that are, like you say, an order of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run. We should have these everywhere, IMO

    https://www.hyperfinemri.com/

    • scratcheee  1 hour ago

      MRIs are fundamentally expensive. Yes we can bring the price down a bit, and we can set more money aside for them, but they’ll always be limited by their price.

      Even if this technique is much worse (I can certainly believe it is) the price might allow uses that would never be practical with MRI even with the best financial support. For example, ultrasound might be viable for use in GPs or small medical facilities which could never dream of justifying an MRI machine.

      2 replies →

  • k33n  1 hour ago

    Many months to a year for an MRI? Wow, in the USA, we can get MRI's the same day or at worst case, week. It's been that way for a decade or more.

    • lostlogin  1 hour ago

      > Wow, in the USA, we can get MRI's the same day or at worst case, week.

      You can. And the cost is higher than almost anywhere on earth.

      You can get them quickly in most places with a publically funded healthcare system, it’s just that a priority patient is very very sick and you never want to be that person.

virissimo  2 hours ago

> MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost

Typical wait time for an MRI in Canada is 2 months.

  • thaw13579  2 hours ago

    Yes, that is a economic & public health policy problem that really needs to be solved. We can look to Japan as example of what's possible, they have invested in nearly twice the number of scanners per capita of Canada, and they can get same-day MRIs for $50, roughly speaking.

    • lostlogin  1 hour ago

      > they can get same-day MRIs for $50

      I’d like to see a breakdown on how they do that. Staffing alone is a multiple of that.