Midjourney, a company that until recently had been known for its AI image generation models, drastically pivoted this week into what it’s calling “a new era” for the company. It started by unveiling a new division called Midjourney Medical built around a whole-body ultrasound scanner the company says will be “in many ways superior to even MRI machines”, with scans taking as little as 60 seconds and requiring no radiation or magnetic fields. The scanner lowers patients into a ring of underwater transducers that emit and record ultrasonic waves from every angle, reconstructing a 3D map of the body roughly 100 times faster than current MRI technology. The company has grand ambitions for its new scanner. It plans to open a San Francisco spa at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners and wants to scale to 50K scanners worldwide and a billion scans per month by 2031.
Midjourney’s scanner elicited a range of reactions. Some hailed it as “the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years” and predicted that it would herald a new era of preventative medicine, with the potential to save many lives. Others were more skeptical. As psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander laid out, ultrasound physically cannot penetrate bone or air, ruling out the brain, lungs, and bowels, which is precisely why MRI and CT remain necessary for most serious diagnostic work. Radiologists he consulted were uniformly critical, with one noting that the entire premise rests on the unproven assumption that earlier detection of incidental abnormalities improves patient outcomes.
This is the same reason the medical establishment already discourages whole-body screening MRIs today: they cost about $2K, are not recommended by the American College of Radiology due to insufficient evidence of benefit, and carry high false-positive rates in asymptomatic populations. Nevertheless, the strongest case for Midjourney’s approach may simply be convenience and cost, since the underlying sensor technology should scale far more cheaply than MRI’s giant magnets.
