I find the “there will be costly incidental findings that cost a lot” critique of full-body scanning confusing.
One key aspect of building great technology, and imagining how technology will improve people’s lives, is to ask “What if doing things the ideal way became cheap?”
His reasoning for those curious:
“Most recent efforts at whole body imaging screening have been whole body mri. The incidental findings for each patient can run hundreds of thousands of dollars, last for years, and lead to innumerable unnecessary biopsies, surgeries and complications.
There are some definite screening interventions we can take, but most require preventing damage (blood pressure and lipid control for blood vessels) at a microscopic level or extremely early detection of cancers (mucosal lesions on colonoscopy, subtle lesions on breast mammograms or breast ultrasounds/ breast MRIs). Almost anything you detect on these imaging scans will be damage already done or metastatic disease and will result in a lead time bias with no true evidence of decreased morbidity or mortality.
The physics for doing this with ultrasound are also against them. For proper deep tissue entrance and reasonable scan times, even with “advanced tech”, the energy of ultrasound source has to be high enough that they will be limited by tissues getting hot. Even if the whole thing is a failure, there may be some important technical developments that come out of the ashes.”
