[0] Ellisman MH, Palmer DE, André MP (1987), "Diagnostic levels of ultrasound may disrupt myelination," Experimental Neurology 98:78–92 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/
[1] Quarato, C.M.I., Lacedonia, D., Salvemini, M., Tuccari, G., Mastrodonato, G., Villani, R., Fiore, L.A., Scioscia, G., Mirijello, A., Saponara, A. and Sperandeo, M., 2023. A review on biological effects of ultrasounds: key messages for clinicians. Diagnostics, 13(5), p.855. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10001275/
I agree on your ground-truth desire, and I would hope they've done a lot of that to validate what we see here.
Here in Australia, it is a one to two day wait for a MRI. Costs 240 AUD, (160 USD ) for a 1.5 Tesla MRI and AUD 400 for a 3 Tesla MRI just up the road.
And if I mark the request Urgent, I can send a patient 5 minutes up the road and have it done within the hour.
Are you in the UK ? I know that the UK health system has effectively collapsed, due to that country's poverty and chaos.
Even in Sudan the waiting time is less than in your country:
"Due to the ongoing conflict in Sudan, healthcare infrastructure and diagnostic imaging services have faced severe disruptions, with wait times for an MRI now extending from several weeks to months"
It's a valid point to raise, and a point critical of "boutique" medicine practices specialising in insecurities of the rich.
In a nutshell our flesh is rarely homogenous, more often tarnished by odd blemishes and gnarly growths that often amount to naught.
Experienced work a day doctors appreciate seeing odd lumps earlier but refrain from taking any action until some threshold is crossed "for fear of doing greater harm" - the knives that cut things out, the concoctions that burn things away often come with side effects.
Contrasting that, the Lamborghini doctors actively self promoting their genius on 60 Minutes and other Australian paid journaltising media - they're up for any excuse to charge for an "essential procedure" (pinky promise no failures).
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.
This makes more sense than the comment elsewhere here that says $50.
My guess: It would be a basic scan with minimal sequences and low quality at that price.
There is no world where vascular imaging with a methodology like this is better than what I can do today in a GP clinic with a handheld GE or butterfly (or similar) US probe for anything that matters:
- for dvts and thrombus I can already image them
- if it’s in the brain the last thing that is useful for you to do is fuck around in a small clinic when you should be getting to a major tertiary centre as soon as possible
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.
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.
Surely that it isn't the norm? Where do you live that the (I assume government run) health system dismisses evidence when its collection wasn't sanctioned by official channels?
An MRI machine costs roughly 1000x as much.
The machine itself covers its cost at only ~84 monthly scans @ $200 each. That says to locate near population centers where the demand exceeds 84 scans. At the global mean of scans/population, said "population centers" only need to be about 15k residents.
Labor costs + junk fees make them appear expensive.
The running costs are also eye watering.
Typical wait time for an MRI in Canada is 2 months.
I’d like to see a breakdown on how they do that. Staffing alone is a multiple of that.
I can’t see how you can do it for $50. Does the ‘universal healthcare’ bit mean that the government is paying most the bill and it’s $50 out of pocket?
One funny thing about MRIs is the magnet is always on, so there could be some clever ways to reduce costs running them after hours.
It seems like a dedicated round the clock facility housing at least dozens of MRI machines ought to offer significant economies of scale. I wonder if I'm wrong about that or if there's some other reason we don't see this approach taken by governments.
Is the premium really that large for the night shift at (for example) a hospital? But even if you can't do 24/7 presumably there are physicians and technicians who would be willing to do either early morning or late evening without demanding much of a premium.
A massive daytime only facility should at least enjoy reduced capex and maintenance burdens if they have enough machines in one place. Less duplicated infrastructure and everything closer at hand.
Although if as you say even a small service can paper over 6 DNAs without missing a slot then maybe there isn't all that much to be gained here.
However that’s a bit meaningless as night shifts don’t exist. MRI is run as an oncall service and only acute scans are done at night - good luck getting a consultant to come in for anything less.
There are staff who like early starts (6am) and a smaller number who like to finish a bit later 6-9pm).
Techs are lucky enough to be in demand and if an employer pushes too hard, they’ll go somewhere that’s a better fit.
We only site 2 MRs next to each other, so savings are going to be minimal but we do see staffing advantages and less downtime. Coils scan swap between machines, one chiller can supply both MR scanners (just… be careful).
https://apex.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Te-Whatu-Ora-...
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
Africa, Central & South America are clearly underserved, perhaps a good opportunity for ultrasound and low-field MRI
The high resolution images were generated by injecting sparse bubbles of this contrast agent. How sparse are they? Is the image we see a stacked set of many bubbles over time composited together?
Their aspirations at the end of doing this without the bubbles are great, but there’s a big “now draw the rest of the owl” energy around that leap. The first technique relies entirely on the bubbles, but they provide no explanation for how they think this could be achievable without the bubbles other than vaguely saying that technology is advancing.
The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensing was an extremely hot field a while back.
But RBCs are weird squishy things, and they fill the bloodstream quite densely, and ChatGPT estimates that they’re spaced about 20µm apart and that, when confined to a capillary, they’re about 7µm long. (And that sounds at least plausibly correct to me.)
So, even ignoring the much worse scattering properties of RBCs, they not nearly as sparse. You mostly lose a whole dimension of sparseness and up trying to resolve the entire capillary. Which seems possible but much harder. Unfortunately, brain capillaries are about 40µm apart, so the result might be a mess.
The article did not say what wavelength they’re using or what their native (wavelength/2) resolution is.
I’m filing this in the category of technologies I wish could be true, but for which no plausible path to overcoming the obvious limitations has been provided.
My assumptions here are *extremely generous*, i.e. favorable to the "oh, we'll just make it work with natural contrast", and even then, they can't hand wave 5-6 orders of magnitude of improvement. Furthermore, because of the use of super resolution, I'm guessing there's some exponential factor in there, i.e. double the density of bubbles/tracking points past some critical limit, then you need 8x the data to reconstruct things.
https://pdf.benchchem.com/1673/Application_Notes_and_Protoco...
So 1-5e8 bubbles per mL, and let’s suppose you inject 5mL. (I have no idea what the human dose is, but that’s what’s in this particular kit.)
You apparently have 5e9 or so RBCs per mL of blood:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_blood_count
You have about 5L of blood, so that’s three orders of magnitude more volume than the contrast, and RBCs are 10x-50x as concentrated as the microbubbles in the syringe, so about 4 orders of magnitude concentration difference.
It’s basically changing this from a 0D problem to a 1D problem.
The page is vague so I can't tell. I think the images they're showing are actually a composite of many bubbles tracked through the vasculature.
They say this:
> As bubbles flow through the vasculature, we accumulate millions of these positions and stack them into a single image with detail finer than the wavelength.
And the rendering showing the bubble centers they're tracking only shows a few small points moving at a time.
I think that the amazing animation they produced at the top is actually a composite of many different trackings, not an actual representation of what they capture in real-time.
There's a compelling argument to be made that the level of detail in "mind reading" they are gesturing at is plain unrecoverable with hemodynamics. There's an irreversible loss of dimensions that occurs the instant you start recording blood instead of spikes on the neural circuits themselves, and it's not at all clear that what a VC reading the words "telepathy" is imagining even survives that transformation.
What you have is food delivery data for a neighborhood, this can tell you a surprising amount, including when they might throw a party. What it can't tell you, however, is who wore the best outfit and what was talked about over dinner. The information simply does not survive across the interface.
There is a spectacular canyon between "informed interpretation" and "mind reading"
A whole world of reasoning behind evolutionary solutions to explore.
If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a new Brain Pole in my neighborhood? I saw a bunch of dark thoughted young males around and my amazon think camera says the probability of missing packages increased.
[0]https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundatio...
All of these imaging techniques are very involved. Ultrasound requires direct contact and this technique only works with a long IV infusion of bubbles. fMRI isn’t going to be a portable device that you can point at something for many reasons.
The connection to what you’re thinking is more sci-fi than reality. This technique could theoretically see some changes in blood flow to different regions, but what would that mean? Is the patient having anxiety, or are they just nervous about the IV injecting bubbles into them to travel to their brain and the machine attached to their head?
I wonder what Orwell would have thought.
I share your hesitation about using this on the brain, at least barring exhaustive long term animal model trials. Subject a mammal to this every day for 10 years and show that there are no negative effects relative to the control.
The team behind this post is (or at least was as of a few months ago) working with Midjourney.
I am skeptical of any brain ultrasound claim that doesn’t use skull correction which requires a CT scan.
Very large chunks of vasculature and major arteries are missing in the images they provided. Just because it’s pretty and colorful it doesn’t mean it’s useful.
Perhaps it will one day, but this doesn’t prove much so far. There are several physical challenges to using ultrasound.
> None of us were ultrasound scientists before this. We worked backwards from a desire for brain interfaces and taught ourselves physics, ultrasound, electromagnetism.
Not to say it’s not interesting or neat, but the Silicon Valley approach to solving medical issues doesn’t have a good track record, let’s put it that way
They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles.
The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into everyone’s veins.
When used as a contrast agent for ultrasound, it "has been used to examine the vascularity of tumours" -- which would be similar to its use in the OP. Then "[i]t remains visible in the blood for 3 to 8 minutes, and is exhaled by the lungs."
So -- not collected and excreted by the liver, as I at first thought.
I've worked on ultrasound devices and data, the shadows from bone, and distortions caused by tissue types were very difficult. If this device can deal with those distortions it would already be useful for lung imaging.
Happy to be corrected. But if that's right then this... does the BS thing in a potentially less intrusive way?
I have no biology background, but one ML PoV in-depth description I read of these sounded indistinguishable from BS.
The tell is "super resolution", "brain computer interface" and "mixed modality" -- adding some contrast agent here, or maybe an IR light source.
It turns out the nyquist limit, diffraction and physics are real things.
The same thing has been said about robotics, AI, space travel, etc. etc.
I'm not saying this is the way, and I have significant questions of understanding thought based on reading brain activity, but I wouldn't put down the entire ultrasound field.
Until implies we're just waiting. Unless implies actual evidence, and - in medical procedures - some guarantee of safety.
SF6 plus ultrasound is used to open the blood brain barrier. So if you're pumping a lot of ultrasound into a brain and using a lot of SF6, there are already risks.
The only reason this even exists as a brainfart and hasn’t been immediately laughed out of VC funding is because other imaging modalities require either ionising radiation (illegal to produce without source licences) or an enormous magnet (would be wildly unsafe in the hands of what appear to be circus clowns).
Geoffrey Hinton was hilariously wrong 10 years ago about replacing radiologists, and this is just embarrassing. Maybe try fixing US healthcare funding instead if you want cheaper scans.
You are misinformed.
“Targeted frequencies” - righto.
So that development isn't new; what's new is to use it broadly for imaging instead of for highly targeted stimulation.
(IV with microbubbles that they can trace as it flows through the brain & some extra imaging algorithms)
I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?
Ignoring all of this, there are few sub specialist radiologists in the world who could theoretically do this and if you were to pay for their time it would cost more than a highly reproducible and easy to get MRI.
But high resolution imaging of blood flow? That's a pretty great medical diagnostic tool if you can make it more available and cheaper.
> The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. They're an FDA-approved contrast agent,
Combined with ultrasound, could these be causing damage of any kind to the vasculature?
> A few years ago, a paper came out that blew our minds. The idea was that you can decode what someone is looking at just from their brain activity.
How realistically close can this get to reading thoughts, visuals, etc.?
Do we have a path to imaging people's visual cortex? Their inner lives, dialogues, memories? (Scary thought - this could be used as an interrogation tool without consent. "Did you kill Bob?" could be a simple brain scan.)
Can it be done in real time in a feedback loop and perhaps be used as an advanced reinforcement learning system?
That's bad enough in democracies, but the consequences in more common forms of government seem really dystopian.
Edit: wow, serves me right for asking / not understanding that contrast means SF6...