Startup Midjourney, best known for its AI-powered image generation software, is making a surprising leap into the medical imaging field.
Startup Midjourney, best known for its AI-powered image generation software, is making a surprising leap into the medical imaging field.
Midjourney has announced the creation of a division called Midjourney Medical. To promote the new technology, the company says it is opening a spa in San Francisco. There, guests will be able to step into a “shallow pool of golden light,” then be immersed in a tank where ultrasound sensors will scan the body and AI will compile that data into MRI-like images, The Register reports .
“When you dive into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns emitting waves, collectively capture the reflected signals, compress them, and then stream the data to a huge cluster, where thousands of computers share the task,” Midjourney explained in the announcement. “By analyzing how the shape of all these waves changes, we recreate a detailed map or ‘image’ that, in effect, allows us to understand what’s inside.”
Midjourney plans to deploy more than 50,000 of these machines worldwide by 2031 “with a total capacity of one billion scans per month” for use as a preventive medicine tool. It’s not yet clear how fast the prototype works, but Midjourney said their goal is to get the entire process down to about one minute.
"We believe it is entirely possible that through widespread early diagnosis, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs in the future," the company added.
The prototype features a ring of 40 scanners. This 40-element ring contains 358,000 ultrasonic sensors, made up of tiny transducers. They create ultrasonic waves in the water and simultaneously record how those waves change as they hit the body of a person in the Midjourney tank up to a thousand times per second.
The Midjourney scanner is capable of capturing tissue details down to the subgamma size, which is on par with standard clinical MRIs, but falls well short of the resolution of more modern models.
Midjourney said it plans to open its first spa with an ultrasound scanner in late 2027, but the company will have to overcome another hurdle: getting approval from the FDA. In addition to perfecting the technology so that the second-generation scanner is ready for a salon opening in 2027, “the next hurdle is regulatory compliance,” the company said.
“Typically, any diagnostic medical service requires FDA approval,” Midjourney explained. “We’re starting by simply providing you with detailed body composition maps, and we’ll be regularly submitting test results to the FDA to expand our capabilities.”
Midjourney also doesn't mention exactly how it will store and protect these scan results, whether it will use them to train its body composition algorithms, and how it will ensure that these algorithms correctly identify things that would normally take a human several years of training and practice to learn.
