” As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words
rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to
reduce. Every leader of inadequate education or limited intelligence hides
behind exuberant inebriation of loquacity.”
Sorry about the podcast link, the gist is that Ukraine now can build drones from cardboard, controlled from Kiev, London etc. that can destroy Russian tanks.
LAMP = 'Loop-mediated Amplification, which allows detection of small amounts of viral RNA from oral/nasal swabs even in an early stage of the infection.' (definition from the linked preprint paper)
Part of this comment made me think of Albert Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty' [1] - at least as I have understood the argument, comparing the 'standby passive observer' to the 'loyalty' standpoint, and the commenters as having chosen the 'exit' option. Hirschman's book is still on my reading list though, together with his 'The Passions and the Interests' - my impression of his work is mostly based on the episodes of Alphachat where they discussed his life and work [2,3,4]
I’ve had the same problem, and I have youtube premium. Though it’s not consistent, sometimes it works, which makes me think that it might be related to some choice of the content creator.
I actually arrived in New Zealand with mud under my walking boots once - we had been trecking on Rarotonga, Cook Islands the day before, and I had not read the customs rules for NZ before filling in the paper slip, shortly before getting off the plane (if I remember correctly, it was approximately 10 years ago) - I had to wash the soles in a shallow tub with some sort of squishy pillow in it.
A simple one page frontend to The Sounds of Spotify - for music discovery. As stated in the 'About':
"Some summers ago I discovered the user The Sounds of Spotify and as I was scrolling through all its playlists I thought it would be useful to be able to search for the name of a city or genre and find the associated playlist(s). This page is not endorsed by Spotify or any of their business partners.
Later I found out that the data comes from Glenn McDonald of everynoise.com, where an interesting map relating different genres can be found."
I have used it myself on and off behind a firewall, but I figured maybe it could be interesting for someone else. My latest discovery is The Sound of Russian Indie.
You are of course right about the cost and accessibility, low field not necessitating specific rooms or ‘no go’ zones, and presumably easy operation (controlled via iPad app) being very interesting with regards to increased availability of MRI scans(in Sweden the rate limiting step at the moment is usually the availability of trained MRI technicians). In my initial comment I mostly thought about some clinical situations in my current practice where it would be useful. Sorry if the following becomes a bit rambling.
Reasonably there are a plethora of indications and given that these machines will be installed at the point of care (A&E, ICU, etc) and supposedly are safe to use on basically all patients, one can imagine that it will be used very frequently. Though in this case the scan-time (30 min + change) could become a limiting factor (but, given it’s price, I guess you could just buy more machines). The image quality is of course not the same as with a modern clinical system but it is most certainly good enough for a preliminary test, and may very well decrease the number of patients sent for a ‘normal’ diagnostic scan (though the opposite may also be true, if you see something unexpected in the images, or if there are artefacts which are difficult to interpret). As with the ‘fast MRI’ I referenced to earlier, my current idea would be that it can be used as an initial screening, but, as always, if the test is normal, but the clinical suspicion persists one would have to continue with other tests.
Regarding whether the image should be read by a specialist or not, I am of course biased towards the specialist :) As I see it the main advantage of having the clinician interpreting the image is that they have ‘direct access’ to the patient, and can ask them specific questions based on the findings of the test. Though, time-utility wise it’s faster for a specialist to read a normal test. During med school I did a rotation at a primary care facility in the north of Sweden, in a municipality with 6000 inhabitants, located almost 2 hrs away from the closest hospital, the GP:s there read chest x-rays themselves at that time. Now the images are transferred digitally to the main hospital of the region and read by a radiologist. One can of course wonder whether it’s cost effective to train a large number of radiologists to read all the new studies which will be produced. My hope here is that computer aided diagnostic tools will increase the productivity of radiology specialists.
My experience from working together with neurosurgeons and neurologists who are very good at reading images in general, is that they anyway prefer to consult us for the interpretation, (they would rather operate than become specialist radiologists). In my opinion the professionals at risk of being side-stepped are the general radiologists, and I think this is already happening as telemedicine makes it possible for smaller hospitals to pay for specialist readings on a per study basis.
edit: regarding time utility, one would of course have to include the time it takes for the referring physician to write a request, and for the radiologist to write a report. And another advantage of having the clinicians read the image is that they have more information about the patient than they put in the request. So it’s also very possible that radiologists will not be consulted (depending on medicolegal circumstances and reimbursement systems etc.)
Being a neuroradiologist (at Karolinska in Stockholm, Sweden) I really love the idea of this and almost can’t wait to start doing comparative studies to find how sensitive it really is. As I see it there are a couple of areas where it could be of tremendous use - first of course the (neuro) intensive care unit, where patients sometimes are to unstable to transport to the MRI, and where every transport is a potential risk for the patient, and where it can be very useful to find out whether they have ischemic lesions in the brainstem (which can be difficult to rule in/out on CT) or extensive diffuse axonal injuries, etc.
Another area would be pediatric imaging, where it could be useful as a first imaging, ruling out larger lesions, possibly lessening the need for CT and decreasing radiation exposure, especially in the group approximately 1-4 years, who often need sedation to lie sufficiently still inside the MRI. Although at my institution the physicists have developed a ‘fast MRI’ (70 seconds), that gives reasonable resolution and contrast (T1,T2,T2*,DWI), and which we will try to implement in the group of patients who come to ‘try’ the machine (before deciding whether they need sedation or not).
Also, the low field strength, 0.064T vs 1.5T or 3T, would most probably allow us to image patients with implants which are unsafe at normal clinical field strengths of 1.5 or 3T (would have to be verified though).
For people interested in low field imaging the group at Athinoula A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard has a homepage at https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/lab/lfi
