"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.
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
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.
Why would they remain fundamentally expensive? It is a fixed machine (so eventually you recoup the investment) and running consumes nothing other than electricity and a paper gown. MRIs cost under $200 in Japan.
Yes totally, and ultrasound already does wonders in that regard. It's a good strategy to focus on the specific use cases that match the strengths of the tech. I think MRI will be useful in validating and mapping out those cases.
> 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.
Scarcity demands some means of rationing out the product. Setting higher prices is one means of doing this, so only those with some means of paying can get it. Another approach is via wait times, where only those who can wait and afford the time penalty can get it. There are other variations, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The scarcity comes from waiting to get preapproval from your physician and health insurance. If you are willing to pay out of pocket, there are many private MRI clinics that will scan you to your heart's content, as quickly as you want, as long as the payment clears.
Granted, anything you find in that reading won't be accepted by your physician or insurance company, so it's more of a checkup for you and you alone. And most scans will find something anomalous. We're all asymmetrical and lumpy. so take that as you will.
Until your project has some success, and it turns out all those "complex" features actually turn out to be extremely useful.
Which is exactly what is happening with us, too bad we didn't choose K8S from the get-go and stuck with a "simpler" tool (gaining very little in the process).
I worked at a place (a big name in a given vertical!), where the SRE looked at K8S and said "hold my beer".
Out came Docker, dnsmasq, miles of duct tape and a whole lot of swearing. Just to come nowhere close to reinventing something better folks were doing years prior.
Just because you can (or think you can) doesn't mean you should. I sure do hope no one is maintaining that NIH monstrosity now!
At a growing LargeCo now, and have been entrusted to some internal flows as an associate. I honestly don't know how Ops Managers get through the day. So many pipelines with basically non-existent audit trails. So much money leaking from the cracks in these places that it's criminal. I wouldn't trust these people to hold my beer, let alone sensitive data.
I wired up a stream deck to perform long-running tasks. Very much tailored to the kind of HCI that I prefer, so I can be interrupt driven versus checking on status all the time.
Eg: push a button, it shows that it's working for a while, then strongly flashes when it's done (success/failure). When you have it right under the monitor, it's like a macro pad for long-running things.
This reminds me of some of the very early peripherals you'd see on the Alto and other computers. I was surprised something like this didn't seem to exist, but maybe I'm just terrible at searching.
What annoys me is this is how a lot of people expect social interactions to happen - so if you want to stay off the corporate platforms to maintain your attention/mental health, etc - you get treated like you're snubbing them.
I'm a big YouTube addict, but I dropped social media well before that was cool.
I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.
I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their customers eventually.
They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
I agree on your ground-truth desire, and I would hope they've done a lot of that to validate what we see here.
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