Midjourney Announces Medical Division: A Full-Body Scanner With 358,000 Ultrasonic Transducers

A company that got famous generating AI art now wants to give you a full-body checkup.

Three key facts

From pixels to ultrasound. On June 17, Midjourney officially unveiled its Midjourney Medical division and its first product — a full-body ultrasonic scanner. The device arranges 358,000 transducers into a ring array; the patient passes through the ring while ultrasonic vibrations penetrate the body to generate cross-sectional images of muscle, tissue, and other structures. The company claims a target scan time of 60 seconds versus the roughly 60 minutes a traditional MRI takes, at a fraction of the cost.

The prototype is still in its infancy. The current prototype takes about 20 minutes per scan and has only been tested on around 12 people. From 20 minutes to 60 seconds is a 20x engineering gap. Midjourney's stated goal: manufacture 50,000 of these scanners and bring full-body imaging to every person on Earth.

They're also building a spa. Midjourney envisions placing these devices in spas and announced it is building its own spa in downtown San Francisco, expected to open in 2027.

WangDou's Take

An AI image generator announcing it's building a medical-grade scanner is roughly the same energy as a hot-pot chain announcing it's developing a rocket engine. The 358,000-transducer spec sounds impressive, but the prototype scans one person in 20 minutes and the total test pool is 12 humans — that's a 20x gap from the 60-second target. The real sweat-inducer is FDA clearance: medical devices aren't Discord bots — you can't ship first and iterate later. As for putting scanners in a San Francisco spa — Silicon Valley's biohackers will probably line up, but that's a long way from "full-body imaging for every person on Earth."

Source: PetaPixel — Midjourney, the AI Image Generator Company, is Making an MRI Scanner