Can you know a field too well?
What a 35-year professor and a self-taught outsider each saw in the same ultrasound.
A note first - this one touches on miscarriage and loss. Both founders mentioned below were guests on The Healthtech Podcast, and this piece grows out of those conversations alongside their published work. I have no commercial relationship with either company.
I recently recorded two podcasts (a few weeks apart) with founders of ultrasound AI companies, both driven by personal stories and really tough lived experiences.
They were also both convinced that the obstetric ultrasound, the grainy black-and-white image nearly every pregnant woman in the country lies down for, holds far more than we currently pull out of it. One of them has spent thirty-five years inside paediatric medicine and the other had never read an ultrasound in his life.
Yet they arrived at the same fundamental belief from opposite ends of the earth, and that convergence is fascinating. Each could see something the other structurally couldn’t and the field is much richer for having both of them leaning over the same image, asking very different, very valid questions.
I’ve written this one around the idea that insiders often say to outsiders with a bold vision… “If it were possible, we’d already be doing it.” That might be the most expensive sentence in medicine, I’ve heard it a lot in my career, and I want to work out what it protects, and what it costs.
