Midjourney CEO David Holz recently showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the “cat pictures” produced by an AI image generator. Called the Midjourney Scanner, it’s a full-body ultrasound-based scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture specific slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscles, fat, bones, and organs to boot. Ideally, Holz said, you can do this once a year or every single day, as it “aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways.”
He revealed that another method he would like to use is to see how his body changes in response to changes in diet and exercise, saying, “I’m not the most measured person in the world, you know, but maybe I want to have it every day.” [measurable information].” A set of job listings touts the company’s mission as trying to “build and launch the world’s first full-body CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast, and high-fidelity scanning to millions with an amazing spa experience.”
The Midjourney Scanner was developed in partnership with ultrasound tech company Butterfly Network, which it says uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system.”
The scanning process begins by entering a platform that descends into the water on rails with a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves. It then records the ripples that pass 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 begins by entering a shallow pool of golden light. Then you start going down into the water. Your body goes through a ring of underwater sensors, each one working like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves into your body from all angles. With enough waves, and enough angles, we create a picture of what’s going on inside your body.
It combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power. But after watching the live stream reveal, I’m still unclear on how Midjourney’s AI image-generating technology is connected to Midjourney’s medical effort, beyond some AI computing business that might otherwise be used.
Holz hopes to place 10 scanners at the Midjourney Spa in San Francisco’s Union Square to open before the end of 2027, and promised to scan the hands of attendees at its launch event. The Midjourney Spa will have a gym, saunas, and cold spas along with scanning rooms equipped with a hot tub where guests will step into the water for a scan.
He noted that different medical applications will require FDA approval, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “anatomical maps” that don’t require the same level of approval as diagnostic imaging. It also says that the “library of scans” created by users can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or others, and that, “We take data privacy very seriously – more details about our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”
Holz suggested that these scanners could eventually be better than MRIs, without radiation, strong magnets, or other complexities, to see what’s going on inside people’s bodies “real fast.” In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a category of devices to look for “weird” things and allowed people to “just try to get as much data as possible.”
