Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans

What happened

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Holz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square that will open before the end of 2027, and offered to scan the hands of attendees at its launch event. The Midjourney Spa will have a gym, saunas, and cold plunges to go along with the hot tub-equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned.

He did mention that various medical applications would require FDA clearances, 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. ”

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Why it matters

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

The scanning process starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves. It then records the ripples passing through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images. The scan takes about 60 seconds. Holz said about a dozen people have been scanned so far.

It combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power. But after watching the livestreamed reveal, I’m still unclear on what Midjourney’s AI image generation tech exactly has to do with the Midjourney Medical effort, beyond an alternative business for otherwise-unused AI compute.

What to watch

Holz suggested that eventually these scans could become better than an MRI, without radiation, powerful magnets, or other complicating factors, to get a look at what’s going on inside people’s bodies “real fast.” In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at “weird” things and allowed people to “just try to get as much data as we can.”