Midjourney, known for its AI program that can generate images through text messages, announced its new project: A medical machine that can scan your entire body in 60 seconds. It’s so far removed from what Midjourney is known for that we had to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Well, it’s not April Fools: The Midjourney Scanner is real, and the company is even building lounges where you can find the machines and get scanned.
In its announcement, Midjourney admitted that the project is unrelated to anything we’ve seen from the company so far. However, it is at the level where it asks itself “How do we want to be different?” and “What do we want to be?” Its answer to those questions, obviously, is to introduce Midjourney Medical, and the Scanner is its first hardware product. “We dreamed of something as powerful as an MRI, and as common as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling the path to that — today,” he wrote in his blog post.
After stepping onto the platform, the Midjourney scanner will submerge you at a rate of 2 inches per second. Your body passes through a ring made of half a million squares the size of a grain of sand, each of which can emit visible waves and record the waves that bounce back from your body.
The company compares them to dolphins using echolocation, so scanning is like being surrounded by half a million small dolphins from every angle. It says the result of the scan is “a 3D map of your body, down to a fraction of a millimeter, that looks a lot like today’s MRIs but about a hundred times faster.” Midjourney’s goal is for the scan to take less than 60 seconds, a fraction of the 60 to 90 minutes it usually takes to perform a full-body MRI.
As Crypto Briefing notes, the company is developing a device with a handheld ultrasound device Butterfly Network. Midjourney signed a license agreement with Butterfly Network in November 2025, gaining exclusive rights to its ultrasound-on-chip technology. The project is led by Ahmad Abbas, Midjourney’s head of consumer hardware projects, who joined the company in late 2023 after working on Vision Pro at Apple.
Over the next 12 months, Midjourney will be fine-tuning its algorithms and the Scanner, conducting research experiments and working on a second-generation hardware design. It plans to open its first Scania Spa home in San Francisco sometime next year. The next step is to get the machine’s diagnostic capabilities approved by the FDA. By 2028, Midjourney hopes to expand to more cities and launch its third-generation device that will use custom silicon to enable even better image quality. It says that’s when things will get “ugly,” perhaps in terms of how the Scanner can compete with conventional MRIs.
Midjourney’s ambition is to have 50,000 Scanners available worldwide by 2031. “We think it’s entirely possible that with early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all health care costs,” the company said.
