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The underlying technology is real...and borrowed from a partner the company failed to mention

A San Francisco startup best known for its AI-generation software is making a bizarre leap into medical imaging, and trying to says it hopes draw curiosity-seekers into its new spa to get scanned.

On Wednesday, Midjourney announced the establishment of Midjourney Medical, which it admitted was a bit out of left field. To promote the tech, it claims to be opening a spa in San Francisco where guests will be able to step “into a shallow pool of golden light,” before being lowered into a tank where ultrasound sensors bombard their bodies in order to take a scan that AI pieces together into MRI-like images. This sounds like the plot of a cheap sci-fi movie, but there is some real science behind it. 

“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,” Midjourney explained in the announcement. “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.” 

That “basically” isn’t exactly reassuring when Midjourney says it wants to have 50,000 or more of the things deployed around the world by 2031 “with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month” for use as a preventative health tool. It’s not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute. 

“We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs,” the company added. 

According to a “technical” video included in the announcement, there’s a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney’s dunk tank up to a thousand times a second. 

The Midjourney Scanner, as the company has named it, can capture tissue details up to half a millimeter, which is on par with standard clinical MRIs, but pales in comparison to the resolution of more advanced designs.

Oh, did we not mention our partner?

Midjourney said its scanner is the first of its kind ever constructed, but the technical video says it relies on Fullbody Ultrasound Computational Tomography (FUCT, or USCT, as the industry has taken to calling it to avoid the more questionable acronym). That's not new. Fast, full-body ultrasound scanning that requires patients to be submerged in a water tank has been an active project at Caltech based on a research paper from earlier this year. 

Same goes for the sensors Midjourney is including in its scanner. You wouldn’t know that from reading the announcement, which makes it seem like this was a project entirely of Midjourney’s own AI fever dreams, but ultrasound tech firm Butterfly Network was compelled to issue its own press release “following Midjourney’s public announcement” in order to “provide commentary” on the AI outfit’s new venture. 

Butterfly confirmed in its release that it provided the 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the Midjourney Scanner. The hardware was “licensed under a co-development agreement between the two companies,” according to Butterfly. According to a 2025 SEC filing, Butterfly expects to rake in $74 million over five years for providing the hardware. 

There's some irony in Midjourney's failure to mention its partner: The company has faced lawsuits claiming it used copyrighted works without permission to train its AI image generation model.

We reached out to both companies to learn more. Midjourney didn’t respond, and Butterfly declined to add anything beyond what was in its press release.  

Midjourney said that it’s planning to open its first ultrasound scanner spa at the end of 2027, but it has another hurdle to jump: FDA approval. Beyond improving its tech so that the second-generation scanner is ready for its 2027 spa date, “regulation is the next limit,” the company said. 

“Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval,” Midjourney explained. “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 also fails to mention how it will store and secure those scans, whether it will use said scans to train its body composition-detection algorithms, and how it’s ensuring those algorithms get things right that it usually take a human a few years of education and training to learn. ®