Midjourney, the AI image generator, unveiled a full-body ultrasound scanner that maps the entire human body in 60 seconds and aims for 1 billion scans monthly.
Key Points:
- Midjourney launched a medical division and a full-body ultrasonic scanner that images the body in about a minute.
- The device runs on Butterfly Network ultrasound chips under a deal worth up to $74 million.
- The company targets 50,000 scanners by 2031 and a San Francisco spa by late 2027.
Midjourney Scanner Debuts
The lab announced Midjourney Medical and the scanner on Jun. 18, casting the machine as its first piece of hardware. Founder David Holz framed it as the first new whole-body imaging method in 50 years, one that trades radiation and magnets for sound and water. A platform lowers each user into a shallow pool, where a ring of underwater sensors reads the echoes that pass through the body, then rebuilds them into a three-dimensional map.
Butterfly Network, a semiconductor ultrasound firm, supplies 40 imaging chips at the heart of each unit. Midjourney licensed that technology last November for $15 million upfront plus $10 million a year over five years, and concedes the scanner carries no artificial intelligence yet.
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Holz Targets Spa-Scale Imaging
Holz says the scan rivals an MRI in many ways while finishing far faster, against the hour or more a full-body MRI can take. The company plans more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031. A flagship Midjourney Spa is set for San Francisco by the end of 2027, a roughly 25,000-square-foot site near Union Square fitted with about ten machines alongside hot tubs and saunas.
The longer bet is data, not any single image. Frequent, low-friction scans would build the long-term body records that AI models need to track change over time, rather than read a single snapshot frozen in time.
So far only about a dozen people have stepped through the machine, and the company has yet to publish images measured against an MRI baseline. Holz would not say what a single session will cost. He has argued that wide early imaging could one day prevent a large share of deaths and healthcare spending.
Midjourney's Hardware Gamble
Outside experts urge caution, since whole-body screening of healthy people risks false positives and incidental findings that can trigger needless follow-up tests.
Midjourney will begin with body composition maps, a wellness label that sidesteps the clearance the FDA demands for diagnosis, the same path scan startups already follow.
The pivot still surprises. Midjourney built its name on text-to-image tools and took no outside funding, leaning instead on subscription revenue from its millions of users. The lab now fights copyright suits from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, even as Holz, once a Leap Motion engineer, steers it toward sensors and silicon.
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