Midjourney’s Bold New Venture: The 60-Second Full-Body Ultrasonic Scanner

Introduction

Midjourney, the AI company best known for its revolutionary text-to-image generation platform, has announced a surprising and ambitious pivot into healthcare. At a live event in San Francisco on June 17, 2026, Midjourney founder David Holz unveiled “Midjourney Medical” — a new division dedicated to healthcare — and the company’s first hardware product: the Midjourney Scanner, a full-body ultrasonic CT device that completes a complete body scan in just 60 seconds.

This venture represents what many are calling Midjourney’s “boldest health bet yet,” blending AI-powered imaging technology with wellness-focused consumer experiences.

View Midjourney’s Official Announcement on X

What Is the Midjourney Scanner?

The Midjourney Scanner is a full-body ultrasonic imaging system that uses sound waves and water instead of radiation or magnetic fields to create detailed 3D maps of the human body. Here’s how the process works:

The Scanning Process

1. Step onto a platform: Users stand on an elevator-like platform
2. Gradual water immersion: The platform slowly lowers your body into a tub of water at a rate of 2 inches per second
3. Ultrasonic wave transmission: A ring containing half a million underwater transducers (each the size of a grain of sand) sends ultrasonic waves through your body from multiple angles
4. Echolocation imaging: The sensors act “like a dolphin,” using echolocation to record ripples that bounce off your body
5. 3D reconstruction: AI algorithms reconstruct the echoes into a detailed 3D image of your entire body, down to a fraction of a millimeter

The entire procedure takes no longer than 60 seconds — nearly 100 times faster than traditional MRIs, which typically require 60 to 90 minutes for a complete scan.

Key Features and Claims

Midjourney claims the scanner delivers image quality comparable to MRI in several applications while being far faster and more consumer-friendly.

Technology Behind the Scanner

The device is built on a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network, secured in November 2025, which gave Midjourney exclusive rights to Butterfly Network’s ultrasound-on-chip technology for $25 million. The system uses:

• 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules
• Approximately 500,000 underwater transducers
• About two petaflops of processing power to reconstruct 3D maps of muscle, fat, bone, and organs[x]

The project is led by Ahmad Abbas, Midjourney’s head of consumer hardware projects, who joined the company in late 2023 after working on Apple’s Vision Pro.

The Midjourney Spa: Healthcare Meets Wellness

Perhaps the most unconventional aspect of Midjourney’s plan is where they’ll deploy these scanners. The company is building “Midjourney Spa” — a San Francisco wellness venue that will house the scanners alongside traditional spa amenities.

Spa Features

• Hot tubs
• Saunas
• Cold plunges
• The Midjourney Scanner in a tank of “golden light”

The spa is set to open by late 2027 in San Francisco. The vision positions the scan as “incidental rather than clinical” — something you get while enjoying a wellness experience, not a medical appointment.

Midjourney described the concept as wanting something “as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa”.

What the Scanner Can (and Can’t) Do

Current Capabilities

At launch, Midjourney will offer only detailed body composition maps — showing the relative amounts of muscle, fat, bone, and organs — and will explicitly avoid providing medical diagnoses.

Medical Limitations

Medical experts have raised important caveats about what ultrasound can capture:

Ultrasound cannot penetrate:

• Bone: The brain is behind the skull, making it difficult to image
• Air: The lungs and bowels contain air, limiting visualization

This means the scanner is best suited for:

• Digestive system organs
• Endocrine system organs
• Vascular system
• Superficial tissues like fat and muscle

It cannot immediately replace:

• Most MRI or CT scans (which often image organs ultrasound can’t reach)
• Ordinary handheld ultrasound (which allows technician precision for heart, prostate, and other organs)

Potential Future Applications

Midjourney is starting with body composition maps and plans to submit test results to the FDA for expanded diagnostic capabilities. The long-term goal includes:

• Diagnostic capabilities approval from the FDA
• Potential use for early cancer screening (including breast cancer in dense tissue)
• Longitudinal tracking to monitor changes over time

Medical Experts’ Concerns

Radiologists interviewed by Business Insider raised several critical concerns:

1. Incidental findings: Frequent full-body scanning can lead to incidental findings that don’t matter
2. False positives: Finding more things in the body isn’t always helpful; false positives can cause anxiety
3. Unnecessary follow-up care: Results not interpreted in a clinical context may lead to unnecessary tests and procedures
4. Medical consensus: The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends preventive scanning only when evidence shows high or moderate net benefit

Hank Green, a YouTuber and Science communicator, emphasized on X: “Different scans do different things. We still have all the ones we have because they all fill in gaps that other scans don’t fill. Adding another full-body scan does not replace any of the others, but I very much hope that it adds”.

Midjourney’s Ambitions and Timeline

Scaling Goals

Midjourney has outlined ambitious expansion plans:

• Next 12 months: Fine-tuning algorithms and Scanner, research trials, second-generation hardware design
• 2027: First Spa housing Scanners opens in San Francisco
• 2028: Expansion to more cities, third-generation machine with custom silicon for better image quality
• 2031: 50,000 scanners available worldwide
• Long-term goal: One billion scans per month

Business Model Question

Midjourney did not say whether this healthcare project would refocus its core image-generation business model. The company admitted the project is “not related to anything we’ve seen from the company so far” but is asking itself “How do we want to be different?” and “What do we want to become?”.

Why This Matters

For Healthcare

The Midjourney Scanner represents a potential shift toward:

• Preventive, routine imaging: Making internal body imaging fast, routine, and consumer-friendly
• Lower-cost screening: Potential cost advantage over MRIs if the technology scales successfully
• Wellness integration: Blending health monitoring with spa experiences rather than clinical appointments

For AI and Technology

This pivot demonstrates:

• How AI companies are expanding beyond software into hardware and healthcare
• The potential for AI to eventually improve radiology interpretation and distinguish true positives from incidental findings
• Ambition to collect training data that could benefit future AI revolutions in medical imaging

For Consumers

The scanner could offer:

• Convenient, spa-like health monitoring vs. clinical MRI experiences
• Frequent, low-risk body composition tracking
• Early detection potential (if FDA-approved diagnostic capabilities)

The Bottom Line

Midjourney’s full-body ultrasonic scanner is real, ambitious, and unconventional. It promises MRI-like quality in 60 seconds without radiation, delivered in a spa setting rather than a clinical one.

However, medical experts caution that:

• The technology cannot currently replace most MRI or CT scans
• Full-body screening for healthy people faces medical consensus recommending against it due to false positive risks
• The scanner’s best initial use may be body composition mapping rather than diagnosis

The project remains experimental, with the first spa opening in 2027 and FDA approval for diagnostic capabilities still pending. Whether this becomes a transformative healthcare tool or a novelty for health-conscious wealthy consumers will depend on regulatory approval, technological refinement, and whether AI can eventually solve the fundamental challenges of ultrasound imaging and false positive interpretation.

For now, Midjourney has made what many call “a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope” bet on reimagining healthcare’s foundations