Midjourney Has Just Unveiled a Bizarre New Medical Device

AI imaging giant Midjourney has announced the launch of a new healthcare division called Midjourney Medical, alongside its very first physical product i.e. a full body imaging machine called the Midjourney Scanner.

The company is pitching the device as a way to get data comparable to a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) session, but at a fraction of the time and cost. While a standard full body MRI scan can easily stretch from sixty to ninety minutes, Midjourney claims its device can complete a full scan in just sixty seconds.

The physical design of the scanner sounds more like a sci-fi movie prop than a standard piece of hospital equipment. To use it, a person steps onto an illuminated platform over a shallow pool of water. The machine then lowers the individual into the water at a steady rate of about five centimetres per second.

As the body goes underwater, it passes through a specialised ring packed with roughly half a million sensors that are each the size of a grain of sand. Every single sensor operates as a tiny speaker and a microphone at the exact same time.

The machine sends rapid ultrasonic sound waves through the water and straight through the body from hundreds of different angles. It then records the acoustic ripples that bounce back. Midjourney CEO David Holz compared the process to a dolphin using echolocation to navigate its surroundings.

The data processing side of this project is immense. The machine handles terabytes of information every single second, routing the acoustic data to a massive computer cluster to calculate how the sound waves changed shape as they travelled through skin, fat, muscle, and bone.

The biggest irony of the entire announcement is that Midjourney’s massive venture into health tracking barely relies on the technology that made the company famous. “We’re not even using any AI in this yet, just really cool hardware and software,” Holz told reporters during a press event.

Instead of generating images from text prompts, the system uses traditional signal processing to map real, physical tissue. The only place machine learning currently fits in is during the final display stage, where the system overlays digital labels to identify individual organs and body parts.

To build the physical machine, Midjourney teamed up with a medical technology firm called Butterfly Network. The current prototype relies on forty of Butterfly’s specialised ultrasound on chip modules. The project itself is being steered by Ahmad Abbas, a hardware developer who previously worked on the Vision Pro headset at Apple.