Midjourney Medical: AI Image Firm Unveils 60-Second Full-Body Scanner

When AI technology became mainstream, a lot of attention was given to ChatGPT for its remarkably human-like ability for conversation. But in the field of image generation, one firm quickly became a favorite for artists, marketers, designers, and anyone needing AI-generated visuals: Midjourney.

Midjourney was founded by David Holz, who previously co-founded Leap Motion, making it a fully bootstrapped private company without venture capital.

The company has relied solely on its subscription revenue (ranging from $10 to $120 a month) and reinvested profits to operate and grow.

This independence always helped Midjourney to make unconventional decisions, like mostly growing its audience through Discord (a chat system initially developed for gamers) instead of a traditional online sales funnel with a website. It also made it focus on long-term growth, with the consistent quality of Midjourney’s generated images usually much higher than its competitors.

This is the unconventional streak the company is following with its latest, very unexpected announcement: its entry into the field of medical imaging. Midjourney appears to have developed a full-body scan working with ultrasound that can visualize every detail inside a human body in less than 60 seconds, and for a very low price. Or more precisely, “Full-Body Ultrasonic Computational Tomography”.

The idea is to generate much more medical data at low cost, radically changing how we approach health, medicine, and disease prevention.

“You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

It is not entirely a surprise that AI will play a major role in the future of medicine, as we explained already back in our 2024 article “AI Poised to Become Invaluable Medical Diagnosis Tool“. But that this innovation comes from Midjourney, in partnership with medical imaging company Butterfly Network (BFLY ) instead of a company like Google is more unexpected.

Midjourney Medical Launch

New Business Out of Nowhere

Midjourney announced it as a $74M agreement with Massachusetts-based Butterfly Network. Butterfly is the developer of an advanced ultra-portable ultrasound diagnosis tool and integrated software using AI. The current scanner prototype incorporates precisely 358,400 individual sensor elements clustered into 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules.

The idea is to use an innocuous ultrasound to create a perfect high-resolution 3D model of a human body, performing better than many other, more complex and expensive existing options.

“Ultrasonic CT lets us aim for whole-body imaging that’s in many ways superior to even MRI machines, but the scan takes as little as 60 seconds. There is no radiation, no powerful magnetic fields—just sound and water and 60 seconds.”

The level of detail is so much higher than that of MRI that if this scanner fulfills all its promises, it might make other scanner technology obsolete in a very short time. Especially as it is very expensive, and it typically takes 60 to 90 minutes to do a full-body MRI.

Source: Midjourney

Midjourney announced it as a $74M agreement with Massachusetts-based Butterfly Network. Butterfly is both the developer of an advanced ultra-portable ultrasound diagnosis tool and an integrated software using AI helping diagnosis, called “Compass” (more on that company below).

The visuals created for this announcement are very science-fiction-like, evoking visuals of movies like Blade Runner or Gattaca.

The Full-Body Scanner Experience

The idea is to fully immerse the patient in water, and then use the ultrasound sensors to scan the body “slice-by-slice”.

“With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.”

Midjourney description especially insists on the experience being pleasant and taking no more than 60 seconds, making it remarkably seamless by most medical examination standards. And contrary to MRI or other radiography, there is no need to remove all metals, ultrasound gel, or any other preparation.

“It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you’re done.”

While Midjourney’s long-term milestone is a seamless, 60-second immersion, the reality of the current first-generation prototype is a bit slower. Because of the massive data bandwidth required to process terabytes of raw acoustics, the current Gen-1 scanner takes roughly 20 minutes to complete a full scan. The sub-minute experience remains a target for the planned custom-silicon Gen-2 and Gen-3 iterations.

How Does The Full-Body Scanner Work?

The patient should stand on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water, like an elevator gently lowering the patient at around 2 inches / 5 centimeters per second.

The sensors in the scanner are half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone. These sensors create structured ultrasonic waves, whose ripples are recorded millions of times per second. They are clustered into a ring of 40 arrays of ultrasound emitter/receivers.

These sound data are then transformed into images, as waves travel through the water and your body, they change shape whenever there is a change in density or stiffness, like going from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone.

“If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every 1 second of scan data.”

The resulting data stream is as large as terabytes of data each second. It takes more than 40 gigabytes for just one “slice” of the body, with several hundred such slices created by the end of the full-body scanner for up to 806 terabytes of data per scan.

The resulting image of the body can then be annotated automatically by AI to identify organs, veins, bones, etc, with a resolution as small as half a millimeter (0.02 inches) and reconstructed as a whole body model using at least 21 AI servers with 2 petaflops of compute power.

Source: Midjourney

This absurdly large volume of data is why such an endeavor has not been tried before. Until very recently, this would have overwhelmed any supercomputers and gone way beyond our capacity to process the data into a useful format.

But with the past years’ progress in computing hardware and AI, the time has come.

MidJourney Deployment Plans

While the announcement presents the full-body scanner as a done deal, the company will actually need to spend the next 12 months refining its algorithms and hardware on a daily basis to make it as efficient and reliable as possible.

The idea is to “show off the raw capabilities of our system”, before moving to a functional 2^nd generation of the design.

This model will first be deployed in a San Francisco-based “research spa” slated to open in late 2027. Because the scanner currently lacks FDA clearance for clinical diagnostics, the facility will initially offer highly detailed body-composition maps—tracking the distribution of muscle, fat, and water. Midjourney plans to use the data gathered at this flagship site to incrementally apply for diagnostic FDA approvals over time.

“Our spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body. We’ll do build-out for our first “research spa” which will become the promethean site that enables mass-scale health scanning.”

Source: Midjourney

This is also the step where Midjourney hopes to get the machine’s diagnostic capabilities approved by the FDA.

This will be followed by the deployment in 2028 of the scanners and associated spas to more cities, and an upgrade to the 3^rd generation of the system.

“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 end goal is to reach by 2031 a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide capable of one billion scans a month. This should be enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.

A Community-Driven Development

Faithful to its dedication to feedback from early users on its Discord, Midjourney will apply the same principles for its spa and AI full-body scanners.

For example, it will be publishing regular updates, exciting new scan images, and concepts of the spa as they design and build it out. The company seems dedicated to following its community’s lead in how the details will be ironed out.

“We want to ask you lots of questions too! Your support and opinions help us be confident in our speed and scale and that we’ll make something in the first pass that everyone will love.”

What Can Full-Body Scans Do

The first obvious application of high-resolution, full-body scanners is detecting anything obviously abnormal. This can be abnormal growth like cancers, but also potentially aneurysms, problems in a given organ, etc.

As such conditions are often silent yet life-threatening, increased detection could save many lives.

“We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs.”

But the wider applications would be in fitness and the prevention of diseases in general. Regular scans will not just detect a pre-existing problem, but also directly assess changes in our bodies. It will measure with a precision never achieved before how children grow, how we gain or lose weight, how we age, etc.

“Collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them? And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?”

In turn, this will likely have a wide effect on how we perceive our bodies and our responsibility toward maintaining them in a healthy state.

“The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.”

However, the device faces fundamental physical boundaries inherent to ultrasound. Because sound waves cannot penetrate bone or pockets of air, the scanner is naturally limited: it cannot image inside the skull to map the brain, nor can it clearly see through air-filled organs like the lungs or the bowels. For these areas, traditional MRI and CT scans will remain entirely irreplaceable.

Investing In Midjourney Full-Body Scanners

Butterfly Network

Butterfly is both the developer of an advanced ultra-portable ultrasound diagnosis tool and an integrated software using AI to help with diagnosis, called “Compass”.

Source: Butterfly Network

This system also integrates with Butterfly’s cloud software and hospital IT systems, such as patient files or image banks. In the past years, the company used AI to improve the images, generate diagnosis-relevant measurements automatically, and provide training/teaching practice.

The key idea behind the company’s technology is to bring ultrasound to the modern age by replacing the old, low-resolution piezoelectric crystals with semiconductor sensors.

Source: Butterfly Network

It benefits from the fact that ultrasound imaging is a booming technology with an increasing volume of research for the detection of many health problems, and even to use in innovative treatments like transcranial focused ultrasound therapies.

This widening range of applications for ultrasound technology gives the company a massive total addressable market (TAM) of up to $350B. And that was before considering the newly revealed partnership with Midjourney for full-vody scanners.

The company has been growing its revenues from $73.4M in 2022 to an expected $117M-$121M in 2026, and reduced its net loss from $136.5M to $21M-$25M, thanks to a strong gross margin >65%.

The stock of the company reacted very positively to the partnership with Midjourney, as it likely alleviates any cash short-term risk and demonstrates the value of the company’s expertise in deploying semiconductor ultrasound sensors in medical applications.

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