Midjourney Medical is moving from AI image generation to full-body ultrasound

Midjourney CEO David Holz showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a spa in San Francisco, which he admitted was a little different from the “cat pictures” produced by an AI image generator. Dubbed Midjourney scannerIt’s an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to take vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone and organs to get started. Ideally, you would do this once a year or every day, Holz said, because it “aims to obtain image quality that is comparable to MRI in many ways.”

He mentioned that one method he would like to use is to see how his body changes in response to changes in diet and exercise, saying: “I’m not the most measured man on the face of the earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that information every day (measurable information). A batch of job listings advertise the company’s goal as trying to ‘build and launch the world’s first full-body CT scanner, ultimately providing safe, fast, high-resolution preventive scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.'”

The Midjourney Scanner was developed in partnership with ultrasound technology company Butterfly Network, which said it uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip™ imaging modules per system.”

The scanning process begins with you standing on a platform that falls into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that generate ultrasound waves and then record the waves from them that pass through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images. The scanning will take about 60 seconds. Holz said about a dozen people have been tested so far.

It begins with entering a shallow pool of golden light. Then you start going into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each of which acts like a dolphin, using echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

It combines those sensors with petaflops of processing power. But after watching the live reveal, I’m still unclear on what exactly Midjourney’s AI image generation technology should do with Midjourney Medical’s efforts, beyond stand-ins for unused AI calculations.

Holz hopes to place 10 of the scanners at the Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square, which will open before the end of 2027, and offered to scan the hands of attendees at the launch event. the Medgorny Spa It will feature a gym, saunas and cold plunge pools to go along with scanning rooms equipped with a hot tub where visitors will enter the water to be scanned.

He mentioned that many medical applications require FDA approval, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging. It also says that a user-generated “library of scans” can be shared with doctors, health AI tools, or others, and that “we take data privacy seriously — more details about our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”

Holz suggested that these scans could eventually become better than MRIs, without radiation, powerful magnets or other complicating factors, to get a look at what’s going on inside people’s bodies “very quickly.” In response to one question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at “weird” things and allow people to “try to get as much data as possible.”