<story><title>MRI brain images become 64M times sharper</title><url>https://today.duke.edu/2023/04/brain-images-just-got-64-million-times-sharper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzyz</author><text>This is also how it works in US, you just go to imaging place and they do it immediately. You just have to pay for it. In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.</text></item><item><author>throwaway2990</author><text>&amp;gt; Canada you have to live for 6 months with a knee injury before surgery just because of the wait to access an MRI&lt;p&gt;The healthcare system in the west is just plain stupid.&lt;p&gt;In asia you can walk into a clinic and see a doctor in 30m. Want to get a X-ray or mri etc at hospital? An hour?&lt;p&gt;Yet in NZ a friends sister has been waiting 4 months now to have her shoulder checked by a specialist.&lt;p&gt;It’s easier to fly to asia and see a doctor than it is to try see a doctor is a western country.</text></item><item><author>inasio</author><text>In my opinion [0] a much more interesting track to pursue than super high-T scans that only work on mice (dead mice at that) is low field MRI scanning. MRI is amazing, but incredibly bulky and slow. In Canada you have to live for 6 months with a knee injury before surgery just because of the wait to access an MRI. Companies like Hyperfine (not affiliated) and Deepspin (just learned of them) make low power portable machines (I believe NFL teams were early costumers).&lt;p&gt;A single MRI image is not super helpful, still more art than science, the real benefit comes from having periodic scans against a baseline. Boutique health clinics offer yearly scans to high net-worth individuals, rolling this out to a larger population could have a huge impact.&lt;p&gt;[0] educated opinion, I also collaborated on a PNAS MRI paper</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pigsty</author><text>&amp;gt; In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.&lt;p&gt;Americans really love eating up this meme. 
I can get scans any time in Japan and I never wait. If doctors think it’s an emergency, they’ll do whatever scan is necessary then and there. If not, they’ll pull out a calendar and ask me to pick any day that’s convenient for me.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile my friends in the US are waiting months for basic shit. My dad visited me in Japan in December and had to visit a dentist for emergency care and was offered to do surgery on the spot. He decided to delay it until he returned to the US. The earliest available appointment in his area is next month.&lt;p&gt;It’s insanity seeing Americans parrot this stuff. It’s North Korea-level propaganda. Hell, it’s worse. North Koreans have no access to the outside world so you can’t blame them. Americans just actively turn away anything in favor of “well a guy who knows a guy said he saw a guy on tv who heard about a guy who once heard a story about a guy from a guy in another country said those people wait a long time for health care!”&lt;p&gt;But the strangest thing is countless Americans, including myself, will pop into any thread to talk about how they have endless bad experiences with health care in the US (I’ve been forced to wait forever and then still charged out the ass because my health insurance was randomly rejected), while most bad experiences with other countries is seventh hand info. Americans complaining about health care in countries they’ve never been to far outnumbers people with first hand info—usually the ones with firsthand info are saying “it’s pretty good out there”</text></comment>
<story><title>MRI brain images become 64M times sharper</title><url>https://today.duke.edu/2023/04/brain-images-just-got-64-million-times-sharper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzyz</author><text>This is also how it works in US, you just go to imaging place and they do it immediately. You just have to pay for it. In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.</text></item><item><author>throwaway2990</author><text>&amp;gt; Canada you have to live for 6 months with a knee injury before surgery just because of the wait to access an MRI&lt;p&gt;The healthcare system in the west is just plain stupid.&lt;p&gt;In asia you can walk into a clinic and see a doctor in 30m. Want to get a X-ray or mri etc at hospital? An hour?&lt;p&gt;Yet in NZ a friends sister has been waiting 4 months now to have her shoulder checked by a specialist.&lt;p&gt;It’s easier to fly to asia and see a doctor than it is to try see a doctor is a western country.</text></item><item><author>inasio</author><text>In my opinion [0] a much more interesting track to pursue than super high-T scans that only work on mice (dead mice at that) is low field MRI scanning. MRI is amazing, but incredibly bulky and slow. In Canada you have to live for 6 months with a knee injury before surgery just because of the wait to access an MRI. Companies like Hyperfine (not affiliated) and Deepspin (just learned of them) make low power portable machines (I believe NFL teams were early costumers).&lt;p&gt;A single MRI image is not super helpful, still more art than science, the real benefit comes from having periodic scans against a baseline. Boutique health clinics offer yearly scans to high net-worth individuals, rolling this out to a larger population could have a huge impact.&lt;p&gt;[0] educated opinion, I also collaborated on a PNAS MRI paper</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fallingknife</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s absolutely insane.  I had a knee MRI in SF 5 ears ago, and the out of pocket cost, with insurance, was $900.  Insurance paid around $2000.  And the wait was 3 weeks.  I found a private imaging place that could do it for $750 next day.  Called the insurance company and told them that we could both save some money on this, and got &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s not how it works.&amp;quot;  Bureaucracy is societal cancer.</text></comment>