A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.

So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."

But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...

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wkoszek 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If we scan patient every 6mo starting from age 18 lets say, you could identify the masses in the patient body and track what stays the same, whats growing etc.

	▲	teekert 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But what if most "masses" are cysts or other harmless structures that form during the 80 years we're walking around? I think that after about their 3rd useless biopsy people start to feel the problem with this. Of course we can keep tuning and tuning the models, but in the limit it may well make more sense to wait for symptoms. At least that is the current experience. Now maybe this machine will make sense in screening age 55+, 20 year+, 2 pack+ smokers for Lung lesions (where a much large portion of detected lesions are true positives). We do this currently with CT and this may be better or cheaper. But it doesn't look like it is, and it looks like far (very far) lower res than MRI (often the follow-up of a CT-scan).