What I like about audio gear are the people making stuff better. It never stops. Can we make a better mammography machine ? Would it take a billion dollar or more to improve the state of mammography. And how expensive is 1 machine? TechDas Air Force Zero turntable is $450,000. A better machine would save a lot of lives.
Don’t you think those designing the machines are constantly working on just that?
What do you mean by better?
What do you mean by better?
Someone has to step-up and volunteer. 🙂
The health and wellbeing of thousands of women could be at stake.
jeff
The health and wellbeing of thousands of women could be at stake.
jeff
I know a guy that volunteered to stay 24 hours in a prison cell of a newly built state of the art prison to test if conditions were humane. When he thought all was good he wanted to get out but was not allowed to (24 hours = 24 hours....). He said he would never volunteer to test stuff again.
I am reading about mammography, I am disappointed with the results. So not to make any trouble I will refrain from any further comments, I'm out.
It literally took decades here to change milk cartons to ones that could be opened easily. The same counts for rusk that has now a dent so you can take one out of the package. Decades ... but medical stuff seems to be a category where things are designed well so maybe it is not possible any other way.
Add to this that the testing only takes a short while and women feel the need to complain anyway about anything so all is good 😀 Moves the focus away from the seriousness.
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Some are trying https://www.dyson.co.uk/newsroom/ov...2022/dotplot-winner-uk-james-dyson-award-2022
Now whether this actually ends up better we won't know for some decades...
Now whether this actually ends up better we won't know for some decades...
Its nice to dream, or complain (not sure which you are doing above), but your sort of showing the Dunning Kruger effect a bit there...
Not everything has a technology like a computer, or an integrated circuit (for example in a DAC or DSP chip) that might follow Moore's Law. Some things will not really improve very fast. Like the automobile, for example. It really has not come that far in the long, long time it has been around. We all use them almost every day, yet no "rapid innovation". No flying cars around here like in "The Jetsons". The technology is just not something that can be improved upon all that fast. Change is incremental at best.
And so with human medicine, with established approaches like x-rays or MRI imaging, they depend on technologies that have inherent limitations that just cannot be made better, cheaper, faster all that quickly. I am sure that people are working on it, somewhere, as we speak.
And "A Billion Dollars" is not all that much money for large scale research in the field of human medicine. It's only 1000 million. Just paying the salaries of teams of high powered doctors, and all the support staff, and then trying to invent some new technologies and then get that new technology FDA approved, etc. takes a lot of time and money. So yea, a billion might be about right, or more. Who knows. It's just not going to happen quickly.
The difficulty is entirely the imaging. Delivering the x-rays, imaging the results in 3-d. Being able to distinguish actual cancers from other artifacts such as density differences, it is not easy.
Having experienced two losses in my life, I take comfort in the fact that what I do for a living may help someone down the road. If my assistance in making an x-ray beamline better or a particle beam deliver system more accurate and smaller/cheaper can advance medicine, I will sleep better.
My children understand my passion, I only hope that they live their life pursuing their passion. My co-workers, I hope I instill something in them.
ps.. sorry to be so... Wait, I am not sorry. If any post of mine helps anyone anyhow, I have indeed won!!
John
Having experienced two losses in my life, I take comfort in the fact that what I do for a living may help someone down the road. If my assistance in making an x-ray beamline better or a particle beam deliver system more accurate and smaller/cheaper can advance medicine, I will sleep better.
My children understand my passion, I only hope that they live their life pursuing their passion. My co-workers, I hope I instill something in them.
ps.. sorry to be so... Wait, I am not sorry. If any post of mine helps anyone anyhow, I have indeed won!!
John
I have two friends from college who are radiologists. It's science, art and intuition, but the science has gotten tremendously advanced these past few (err, many) decades!
Soprano who sat in front of me in choir got the second hit and was gone in a few weeks.
One thing I found out of late, big hospitals trade big-name radiologists like baseball players.
Soprano who sat in front of me in choir got the second hit and was gone in a few weeks.
One thing I found out of late, big hospitals trade big-name radiologists like baseball players.
I thought the state of mammography was somewhere in South America near lake Titicaca.
Better than what??
Boob-squash 20 years ago was a disgrace, in hind-sight. 3-D has been coming in, is better, but more expensive, and disgracefully slow on the fringes such as Maine. If you are thinking of old machines, they may be better today or next year.
Ultimately the problem is difficult: cancer cells are not all that different from normal cells. As the tumor ripens there are ways: cancer grows fast so radioactive tracers are up-taked in minutes (they insisted on radio-iodine in my prostate scan); very old tumors can be so dense they starve themselves. But neither makes solid evidence on the film (yeah, sensor-plate now), only cloudy shadows. And a body part which is just wrong for transmissive imaging.
Aside from 3-D, these images are tough to interpret. It must be mind-numbing to read cloudy boobs all day (this is usually done off-site even off-shore because it is such a chore). Artificial Intelligence has other possibly complementary problems.
And.... like colonoscopy, mammography may not save as many lives as we would like. Some tumors grow so slow you die of something else first. Some so fast that detection is never early enough. Some of the mid-speed ones can be pretty-much cured whenever detected. Yes, mammography saves lives but also disrupts lives with false-positives, aggressive biopsies, worry and fret, and expenses from small to bankrupting. That's before we ask how much lifetime x-ray exposure it adds.
Remember the mammography machine companies have BIG incentive for a "better" process. The market is saturated (my 3 small hospitals all have one) and they don't really wear-out and lower running costs rarely pay-back, so the companies die unless they market a "New and Improved" machine. That seems to be behind 3-D imaging.
Males with gynecomastia may be candidates for mammography. A common opinion is that "if men had to do this, it would be better". There is probably truth here; but I assure you some diagnosis and treatment for man-plumbing disease seems medieval.
Flying cars for the average consumer will never be a reality.
It's a cute, humorous idea that's been around for decades, but the reality is.....
Look at conventional automobiles, and how drivers drive them.
The carelessness that results in accidents.
Yeah, put a drunk or dangerous mental case in a flying car.... I don't think so!
For density, a sort of ultrasound scan can be added to the machine, or a second scanning system that does the scan at the same sitting, with the patient in the same position.
PET scans are used in cancer hospitals, and the state of the art for therapy is the Cyclotron.
But many forms of cancer are not detected until it is too late.
PET scans are used in cancer hospitals, and the state of the art for therapy is the Cyclotron.
But many forms of cancer are not detected until it is too late.
Not really, nobody is suggesting treatments, diagnostics, medicines or "miracle cures", just cold machinery operation.
EDIT: ok, now it started to change away from plain machinery improvement.
Guess our wise Moderators will decide whatever´s appropriate.
Personally I have nothing to add from the hardware point of view, and even less from the Medical one, which is shunned here,(for good reason), so will also keep walking in search for greener pastures.
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