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"Honestly, there's no urgency about pushing the scanner further for the moment. To this day there's nothing comparable abroad. The time left to us is plentiful," Holbrook said.
Abroad, even the research running in the same direction as theirs only aimed to use the principle to detect a handful of specific data points. Where would anyone find their brand of madness, setting out to rebuild whole-body images and read whole-body data outright?
And even those foreign efforts existed only as proposals, with the suspicion of grant-fishing impossible to rule out. Nothing like their team, which had results in hand.
Ryan shook his head, unwilling to agree.
"This project of ours doesn't benchmark against any foreign project, so there's no need to measure ourselves against abroad. What we're after isn't being better than foreign countries. What we're after is being the best."
"Mechs didn't exist abroad either, and didn't we still grind through every technical barrier and build them from small to large, bigger and bigger?"
"So with the photoacoustic scanner it's the same. We don't need to watch foreign movements. What we need to do is build it to its best possible effect in the fastest possible time, and let it bring good to the people and to society."
"As long as the photoacoustic scanner succeeds, the impact on the people of this country, and on human society entirely, will be enormous. Every step we take now is laying foundation for what comes after."
Ryan let out a breath, and quoted the figures he'd recently gotten from Patricia.
"Take the disease people care most about. Cancer. Domestically, new cancer cases run close to four million a year, and deaths close to two and a half million."
"Early-stage cancer carries a real chance of cure, but at that stage there are no obvious symptoms. Ordinarily it takes a hospital visit and a CT-type imaging exam to find it at all, which is why most people discover it only at the middle or late stages."
"The photoacoustic scanner can examine people rapidly and reconstruct scan images of the body's interior, and spotting cancer in those is easy. When the time comes, we can stand up convenient intelligent scanning centers in every city in the country, fiscally supported, and make them a free or nearly free public amenity."
"No appointment needed, no registration to fill out. Complete facial recognition online ahead of time, and you can walk into a scanning center for a scan-and-go rapid exam. Afterward, AI image recognition sweeps and reads every examination image, and the moment a suspected case appears, a warning goes out to the person concerned."
"Do that, and on cancer alone, the lives pulled back each year number in the millions at minimum."
And that was putting it conservatively. If the convenient scanning centers Ryan described truly spread across the whole country, the lives reclaimed each year from the grip of disease would multiply another seven or eight times over.
After all, every illness treats best at its beginning, and the scanner happened to catch most illnesses at exactly that beginning.
Hearing Ryan out, Holbrook froze for a moment, and then, all at once, he woke up.
He had been trapped inside a very common domestic habit of mind, forever measuring his own project against foreign peers, and forgetting that the project in his hands had no similar case abroad to be measured against at all.
And the future Ryan had just described had seized his interest completely.
"I'd only ever thought as far as putting this scanner into hospitals, replacing the imaging equipment they use now. I never imagined you meant to make it a piece of public infrastructure!"
That was the point that truly startled him awake. A thought like Ryan's had never once crossed his mind.
Ryan chuckled. "If we really carried the photoacoustic scanner back into the hospitals and let it merely replace the equipment they already have, that would be a complete waste of it."
Put the scanner in a hospital, and it became no different from the CT machines and X-rays already there. A little more convenient, a little faster, and nothing more.
"Rapid scanning, joined to AI that produces results just as rapidly. We have to widen the population it examines as far as it will possibly go. Only then does its advantage come out in full."
"In my vision, the future holds an intelligent scanning center in every city at minimum, open for anyone to walk in and be examined. It could be a pedestrian tunnel. People simply walk through. The AI reads their identity on its own, and the scanners mounted in the tunnel's ceiling scan them as they pass. By the time they walk out the far end, the results have already landed on their phones." Ryan sketched it in the air with his hands, as though a scanning center from the future genuinely sat in his palms.
"And the people receiving those results can adjust how they live accordingly, heading off or treating whatever illnesses might be coming, or have already quietly arrived."
Hearing the future in Ryan's telling, Holbrook grew more stirred still. He saw, with a researcher's sharpness, exactly what a change the intelligent scanning centers would work on the society of today.
"This idea... on first hearing it sounds terribly idealistic. But hearing it from you, somehow it sounds like something with every chance of coming true."
Without either of them noticing, the two had walked all the way to the canteen. The people around greeted them as they came in, and the pair, buried in their discussion, could only nod back.
Even standing at the serving window, Holbrook went on hashing out the scanning centers' details with Ryan without pause.
Only once the meal was finished did the surge in Holbrook's chest finally settle.
He let out a slow, satisfied breath, and laughed with real feeling. "I'm getting on in years, and the research work I did before, honestly speaking, set beside yours it was just muddling along and waiting to die. This is the first time I've felt I might actually have a chance to change this world. Got a little worked up."
"After hearing that vision of yours, what I want most right now is to walk straight back to the office and fight another whole night against the drawings and the instruments."
"Though all of this rests on the premise that our progress goes smoothly and we actually succeed. And right now we still can't obtain clear photoacoustic signals..."
Ryan's signal-acquisition experiments were something Holbrook had followed all along, and he knew the previous several runs hadn't gone well.
"Wait..."
Holbrook suddenly remembered something, and gave his head a small shake. "You said just now you were in the lab running an experiment?"
"It wouldn't happen to be the new signal-acquisition experiment, would it?"
Ryan held up the hard drive for him once more. "The signal data's stored in here. I took a preliminary look. Quite clean. This time it should have succeeded. Now we're just waiting on the human experiments once work resumes, and the imaging algorithm after that."
"You completed the experiment alone?" Holbrook said, astonished.
Ryan said it mildly. "There's nothing difficult about an experiment like this. Back in the day, I assembled Scrapper all by myself, you know."
Holbrook: "..."
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