You probably know Midjourney as a program that conjures up images from text. Now it has come up with something it has never made before: hardware. And not a phone case or glasses, but a medical full-body scanner.
At an event in San Francisco, founder David Holz unveiled “The Midjourney Scanner" and an entirely new division that will oversee it: Midjourney Medical. The scanning process sounds like something straight out of a cheap sci-fi movie. You step into a shallow pool filled with “golden light," a platform lowers you into the water at a speed of five centimeters per second, and a ring of sensors images your insides as you descend.
Holz claimed that the result is “in many ways even better than MRI machines." No radiation, none of the heavy magnets required by magnetic resonance imaging, and all at “nearly one hundred times the speed." The company says a single scan takes around 60 seconds. A full-body MRI, by contrast, can easily take 60 to 90 minutes.
Midjourney’s reputation is built entirely on generative artificial intelligence. Yet the scanner largely does not use it at all. “For now, we’re not using any AI in it whatsoever, just really great hardware and software," Holz said, according to Bloomberg. The company only brings artificial intelligence in at the end. It uses it to identify and label individual structures in the image—in other words, to determine what we are actually seeing in the scan. The imaging itself is purely ultrasound and signal processing.
How does the entire scan work?
The sensors behave like dolphins. They use echolocation. They send ultrasonic waves into the body from every angle and listen to how they return. As you are submerged, you pass through a ring made up of half a million tiny squares, each the size of a grain of sand. Each one can do two things at once. It functions as both a miniature speaker and a miniature microphone. They generate ultrasonic waves and record how the waves return one million times per second.
These grains produce terabytes of data per second. The data travels to a massive computing cluster, where thousands of computers divide up the task of turning the waves into an image. As a wave passes through the water and your body, it changes shape. This happens every time it encounters a change in density or stiffness, such as the transition from water to skin, fat, muscle, or bone. Based on how the waveforms change, the computers reconstruct a detailed map of what is happening inside. It captures details as small as half a millimeter, comparable to conventional clinical MRI.
Midjourney is not the first to have this idea
Midjourney claims that its scanner is the first of its kind ever built. That is not entirely accurate. A technical video reveals that the device is based on a method known as full-body ultrasound computed tomography. And that is not new. Rapid full-body scanning in a water tank is the subject of active research at Caltech, based on work published earlier this year.
Likewise, Midjourney did not invent the sensors itself. You would not know that from the announcement, which makes it sound as though the entire concept came solely from Midjourney. But Butterfly Network, a company that manufactures ultrasound technology, issued its own press release after the announcement. In it, the company confirmed that it had supplied 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the scanner. The hardware was developed under a joint development agreement between the two companies. According to a document Butterfly filed with the U.S. securities regulator in 2025, it is expected to make $74 million from the technology over five years.
There is a certain irony to this secrecy, because Midjourney is currently facing lawsuits from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, which claim that the company used their copyrighted works to train its image generator without permission.
Huge promises and almost no results so far
It is worth dwelling on the word “claimed." Midjourney makes images. It has never built a physical product, never operated a medical device, and the scanner has no regulatory approval. By the company’s own admission, the device can currently only produce “detailed body composition maps." Anything diagnostic—the very thing that would make it a genuine rival to MRI—requires approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Midjourney does not have that yet, but of course it intends to pursue it.
The company wants to have more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031, with a capacity of “one billion scans per month." It also claims that enough early-stage imaging could one day “prevent 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all healthcare costs." Holz has so far declined to say how much a single scan will cost.
A win or the exact opposite?
Doctors are cautious. In interviews with Business Insider, radiologists warned that frequent full-body scans could lead to incidental findings, false positives, anxiety, and unnecessary follow-up care if the results are not interpreted in a medical context. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends preventive screening where studies show a substantial or moderate benefit. Put simply: finding more things in the body may not always help.
YouTuber and science communicator Hank Green also had a mixed reaction. He wrote that he had “some reservations" about how Midjourney was presenting the product. Ultrasound may be promising, he said, but it will not replace MRI, CT, colonoscopy, or other examinations. “If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be this: different tests do different things," Green wrote. Each of them fills gaps that the others do not cover. Another scan will not replace any of them, but hopefully it will add something.
There was also enthusiasm from Silicon Valley. Elon Musk wrote a single word on X: “cool." Ben Parr, chief operating officer of Moltbook, tried the technology and claimed that he could see inside his arm.
A spa with scanners
One detail best illustrates just how speculative the entire plan remains. Midjourney plans to open the “Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco at the end of 2027. The plan calls for a space of roughly 25,000 square feet near Union Square, equipped with nine or ten scanners alongside hot tubs, saunas, and cold plunge pools.
Since you are already wet, why not make use of it? The scan will become a byproduct of a pleasant day. “You’ll barely think about it during your spa visit. And suddenly, you’ll have a vast library of data about your health," the company writes. The spa is intended to be open around the clock, and according to Midjourney, you can visit as often as you like.
The entire project is reportedly moving at “the maximum speed physically possible." Next year, the company will focus on refining the algorithms and hardware, conducting research tests, and advancing to the second generation of the device. In 2028, it plans to begin expanding into other cities and deploy the third generation of the scanner with fully custom silicon, which it says will take image quality and speed to an entirely new level.
Midjourney operates without outside investors and describes itself as a “community-supported research lab." Its funding comes from ordinary people. The company has not yet responded to Business Insider’s questions about billing, health data storage, or exactly how the technology uses AI.
Sources: theinformation.com and theverge.com
