While startup Ezra and biohackers are trying to make MRIs mainstream, medical experts are concerned the full-body scans could do more harm than good — setting up people who have no specific risk of cancer or another illness for overtreatment and overdiagnosis.Johnson, who became a millionaire selling his online payments startup to PayPal for $800 million, is the new poster boy for an old Silicon Valley obsession: “biohacking” your body to extend your lifespan.
But medical experts are concerned that full-body MRI scans could do more harm than good for the majority of patients — setting up people who have no specific risk of cancer or another illness for overtreatment and overdiagnosis. Not to mention the skyrocketing costs of a bunch of unnecessary follow-up procedures.
For Gal, the benefit of knowing and the cost of monitoring outweighs the risk of false positives. “As a culture we’ve been afraid to image more because of false positives but the best way to rule out false positives is to image more,” he said. Ezra does not build any hardware. In fact, the company doesn’t own any MRI machines at all. It partners with existing radiology centers, such as Radnet, and pays those clinics for scanning slots on machines manufactured by GE, Siemens and Philips. The plan is to offer Ezra’s AI at more than 50 locations throughout the U.S. by the end of this year.