One of the popular ideas related to artificial intelligence is that it’ll pave the way for vastly cheaper, advanced medical exams. A movie version of this is the home MRI-like machine, with the protagonist stepping inside it and getting a full body scan and an assessment within minutes (remember the healing med-bay in Elysium?).
Now, Midjourney, the company known primarily for its powerful AI image generation tech, is trying to turn that dream into reality with a new project: a full body, ultrasonic scanner.
Yes, we’re talking an actual, full size, medical scanner, and it’s so far removed from what Midjourney did so far, that in an introductory blog post, the company itself admitted the project is “a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.”
The Midjourney Scanner project is still in a fairly early stage. The company says it will work like this: You step onto a platform, which slowly submerges your body into water. A ring of underwater sensors send ultrasonic waves through your body, and create an image of everything that’s happening inside it (the tech is related to how dolphins use echolocation to explore their surroundings underwater).
The entire process shouldn’t take more than 60 seconds; which is a lot faster than a traditional MRI, which needs 60 to 90 minutes to perform a full body scan.
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The machine takes the picture, the AI figures out what’s what.
Credit: Midjourney
The key — and this is where Midjourney’s AI expertise comes in — is in the terabytes of data produced by the sensors every second of the scan. The company’s post is a little short on the details, but it says the scanner will require immense computational power and AI smarts to turn the sound waves into images. When that’s done, you’ll get a very precise 3D map of your body — and a lot faster than an MRI.
Also, according to Crypto Briefing, Midjourney isn’t going it alone; in 2025, the company signed a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network, a company that specializes in handheld ultrasonic scanners. Also notable is Midjourney’s head of hardware Ahmad Abbas, who has previously worked on Vision Pro at Apple.
Midjourney says it’s moving the project forward at the “maximum speed that’s physically possible.” In practical terms, this means that the first Midjourney Spa with hot tubs, saunas, and Midjourney Scanners, should be opening “in the heart of San Francisco” in 2027. The idea is that you could enjoy the company’s spa facilities as you would in any other spa, but you’d also effortlessly leave with a full scan of your body, and a “huge library of data about your health.”
Welcome to the spa, enjoy your time here, and don’t forget to pick up your scan.
Credit: Midjourney
Before it can open a commercial spa like this, Midjourney will have to spend the next 12 months refining the algorithms and hardware, then building a “research spa,” upgrading to a second-generation scanner, and getting FDA approval for the project. If all goes well, in 2028, Midjourney Spas could start opening in more cities, and that’s also when the company hopes to upgrade to a third-generation scanner. “Gen3 is where it gets ‘serious,’ the silicon for this design will be completely custom and image quality and scan times will be night-and-day,” the post says.
By 2031, Midjourney’s goal is to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide, with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans every month. It’s a very ambitious goal for a company that hasn’t produced any hardware so far, let alone medical hardware. Midjourney says it will document its journey (sorry) by publishing regular updates about the project; beyond that, Midjourney says there will be more “exciting projects” to show in the future.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
