A company known for its AI image generation has made a surprise pivot – to consumer healthcare. Midjourney has announced it will offer a "new form of medical imaging" using echolocation to map the body, in a day-spa setting, with the first center to open to the public in 2027.
The company has revealed its "Ultrasonic CT" – or "full body ultrasound" – under the new Midjourney Medical tag, and plans to roll out as many as 50,000 of these units over the next six years, with an aim to complete a billion full-body affordable and accessible scans to the general public every month.
The first scan-spa will open in San Francisco late next year.
"The center itself is a flagship health spa we are calling the 'Midjourney Spa,'" the company revealed in a statement. "It will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and 10 scanners with the capability to do more body scans a year than all MRI scanners on Earth combined."
Sounds impressive, right? If Midjourney can pull this off, it could revolutionize how we access health check-ups. Regular scans will allow people to monitor their entire body for changes, which has the potential to alert individuals to early signs of chronic illness and disease.
The scanner is nothing like current imaging technology. The company says it requires an individual to stand on a platform, which is then slowly lowered into a pool of water. A ring of underwater sensors using echolocation then "send ultrasonic sound waves through your body," putting together a complete internal map, slice by slice. And Midjourney aims to complete this process in just 60 seconds.
"The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water – an elevator gently lowering you at around two inches, or five centimeters, per second," the company explained. "As you descend you pass through a ring made of 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. Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the ripples back at millions of times per second.
"Together they act as both a choir and an audience – producing terabytes of data each second," Midjourney added. "If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every one second of scan data."
Set in a luxury spa, this non-invasive procedure sounds a whole lot more pleasant than undergoing an MRI or full-body medical in a clinic. And potentially more affordable.
"We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to that," the company stated. "One of the overarching themes of the 21st century will be the expanding reach of intelligence and what we choose to do with it. We talk to artificial intelligences every day – and increasingly we talk to them about our health.
"You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible," they continued. "In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many 'megabytes per second per dollar' of information about your body."
While we don't have more details on costs, or the expansion plan beyond San Francisco, Midjourney is wholly focused on bringing this ambitious project to life. The company noted in its announcement that the next 12 months will be spent refining their algorithms and hardware "on a daily basis." And the team will conduct research trials to assess the system's capabilities.
"The sheer number of mechanical elements, the inconceivable volume of data, and the computational power required for this to all come together is one reason why no such machine was ever made – until now," Midjourney wrote. "As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task.
"By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there," the company added.
The first spa will also house hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and, of course, the rooms with pools fitted with the technology to "softly scan your body." This center will also act as a data hub, gathering real-world information to then inform future Midjourney Health spas.
"Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval," Midjourney noted. "We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps – and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities."
Midjourney plans to expand the technology in 2028, rolling out a third-generation scanner featuring custom silicon for even greater imaging detail. And, by 2031, the company hopes to have more than 50,000 scanners in operation 24-7.
"Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them," Midjourney added.
While it sounds hugely promising, right now it feels like a concept of a plan – as some outlets have been quick to note. So we'll be watching this space in the coming months to see if the ambitious project can be realized.
Source: Midjourney
