Facebook Exec's New Startup 'Open Water' Targets Wearable Brain Imaging (xconomy.com)

gthuang88 writes: Display-tech guru Mary Lou Jepsen is leaving her post at Facebook/Oculus to work on a new startup called Open Water. Jepsen, a veteran of Google X and the MIT Media Lab, says the company will develop wearable MRI devices that could help doctors do early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Inspired in part by musician Peter Gabriel, Open Water also hopes to use advances in neural imaging and brain-machine interfaces to create a system for reading and communicating human thoughts electronically. She believes there's huge potential in the manufacturing plants in Asia that are primarily used to make OLEDs and LCDs. "My big bet is we can use that manufacturing infrastructure to create the functionality of a $5 million MRI machine in a consumer electronics price-point wearable. And the implications of that are so big." At that price-point, every doctor's office in the world could afford such a device and use it to detect early stages of neurodegenerative disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, internal bleeding, blood clots, and more.

Comments

Incredible Claims Require Incredible Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

How?

The magnet field emitted by an MRI is so powerful it can cause metal objects to fly through the air and damage the machine. By what magic of DSP voodoo do they propose to shrink a machine which makes a Microwave Oven look like an LED flashlight by comparison down to a "wearable" size/price?

Does it use the earth's magnetic field with an extremely long "shutter time"? If so: how do they address the target moving while the continuous "exposure" is recording? Where is this data being cached and how is it getting off the wearable and into the cloud?

Re:Incredible Claims Require Incredible Evidence

[plopez]

You don't "get it". It's the cloud, machine learning, BYOD, data analytics, open sourced, sharing, wearable social media.

Think outside the box! Who needs those pesky old sk3wl laws of physics? We can do it better than a bunch of old l4m3rz.

Re:Incredible Claims Require Incredible Evidence

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Oh yeah, a Facebook exec starting a spinoff company that targets my brainwaves....that sounds just wonderful. I'm sure they'd never use it for advertising or anything like that.

Re:Incredible Claims Require Incredible Evidence

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You don't "get it". It's the cloud, machine learning, BYOD, data analytics, open sourced, sharing, wearable social media.

You forgot to mention the synergistic, holographic, customer-facing social-centric envisioneers that will proactively optimize the structuring matrix.

Re:Incredible Claims Require Incredible Evidence

[Ihlosi]

It's not a matter of computational power. Sure, your cellphone has more CPU horsepower than what they used to get to the moon ... but it still doesn't fly to the moon because it doesn't come with a Saturn V rocket. It's a hardware ... thing.

'Display tech guru' ... um okay.

[Ihlosi]

Right. So a 'display tech guru' bets that they can cram a device that a) generates magnetic fields in the single-digit tesla range and that b) basically relies on, electromagnetically speaking, hearing grass grow (and therefore requires a room with relative EM silence) and that c) for a certain range of examinations relies on stuff being injected into the patient, into a safe, wearable, customer-friendly, gadget-priced device.

My prognosis as a medical device engineer is that they'll manage maybe one of those four ...

Oh, and btw, MRIs are cheap, fast and plentiful today. I've experienced a time when that wasn't the case, when there were two devices in the whole country and a month-long waiting list based on how interesting your case is. And the examination took over three hours, compared to just under 30 minutes today. If anyone claims that MRIs are too expensive today, my guess is that they're in country with a backwater health insurance system. Which could be fixed more easily than cramming a medical-grade MRI into a gadget form factor.

Re:'Display tech guru' ... um okay.

[ChumpusRex2003]

EM shielding is still essential, and nothing has really developed to change this. The signals are incredibly weak, and extensive RF shielding is required. To give an example, an incandescent light bulb in the scanner room which is reaching end-of-life can produce so much RF from micro-arcs on the failing filament that it can completely swamp the signal.

Capital cost is still very high, typically in the region of $1.5 million for a 1.5T machine, and $2.5-3 million for a 3T machine. Capital costs for the more capable machines are going up due to various developments - e.g. parallel receiver channels (up to 256 channels in the latest machines), parallel transmit channels with higher pulse powers (currently 2x 40 kW RF power amps and transmit antennas, but systems with 4 or 8 transmit channels are in development). Not to mention that there is a push towards larger dimension magnets, which substantially increase the capital cost.

There has also been considerable development in new algorithms for faster imaging, by using incomplete or overlapped imaging acquisitions, which requires extremely complex mathematical processing. CT scanners went through this development a few years ago to improve quality and reduce radiation dose, and image reconstruction went from a 1 ms task running in software, to a 250 ms task running on a 20U rack packed with $250k+ of GPUs. It is likely that the next generation of MRI scanners will use similar compute hardware.

All MRI scanners made in the last 5 years are zero-helium loss, so should not require any top-up of helium. However, they do need heavy chillers to recondense the helium - chillers with cooling powers of up to 1 W are now routinely used, which bring with them energy costs of around $20-30k per year. Many manufacturers also offer helium-free magnets (essentially the magnet coils are bonded to a giant copper/aluminium thermal mass, which is bonded to a cryochiller), these are substantially more expensive in capital cost, and energy cost, and much less tolerant to power failure. However, for areas where helium fills are impractical or too expensive, then these are a viable option.

Meh, I'll wait until it's injectable into eyeballs

[melted]

Meh, I'll wait until it's injectable into eyeballs.