Midjourney, known for its AI program that can generate images from text prompts, has announced its new project: A medical machine that can scan your whole body in just 60 seconds. It’s so far removed from what Midjourney is known for that we had to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Well, it’s not April Fools: The Midjourney Scanner is real, and the company is even building spas where you can find the machines and get scanned.
In its announcement, Midjourney admitted that the project is not related to anything we’ve seen from the company so far. However, it’s at the point where it’s asking itself “How do we want to be different?” and “What do we want to become?” Its answer to those questions, apparently, is to launch Midjourney Medical, with the Scanner being its first hardware product. “We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to that – today,” it wrote in its blog post.
After you step on a platform, Midjourney’s scanner will submerge you in water at a rate of 2 inches per second. Your body passes through a ring made of half a million squares the size of a grain of sand, with each one of them capable of emitting ultrasonic waves and of recording the ripples that bounce off your body and back to it.
The company compares them to dolphins that use echolocation, so going through a scan is like being surrounded by half a million tiny dolphins from every angle. It says the result of the scan is a “3D map of your body, down to a fraction of a millimeter, that looks a lot like today’s MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed.” Midjourney’s goal is for the scan to take less than 60 seconds, a tiny fraction of the 60 to 90 minutes it typically takes to do a full-body MRI.
As Crypto Briefing notes, the company is developing the machine with handheld ultrasound device maker Butterfly Network. Midjourney signed a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network in November 2025, securing exclusive rights to its ultrasound-on-chip technology. The project is led by Ahmad Abbas, Midjourney’s head of consumer hardware projects, who joined the company in late 2023 after working on the Vision Pro at Apple.
Over the next 12 months, Midjourney will be fine-tuning its algorithms and the Scanner, doing research trials and working on a second-generation hardware design. It plans to open its first Spa housing Scanners in San Francisco sometime next year. The next step is to get the machine’s diagnostic capabilities approved by the FDA. In 2028, Midjourney hopes to expand to more cities and launch its third-generation machine that will use custom silicon to enable much better image quality. It says that’s when things will get “serious,” perhaps in relation to how the Scanner can compete with standard MRIs.
Midjourney’s ambition is to have 50,000 Scanners available worldwide by 2031. “We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all healthcare costs,” the company said.
Credit: Source link