In February 2024, scientific journal Frontiers was forced to retract a paper by a team of Chinese and Indian researchers after finding that their study contained nonsensical, AI-generated diagrams, including one of a rat with wildly oversized genitals.

As the scandal unfolded, the researchers admitted that they’d produced the absurd picture using Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator. Two years later, Midjourney is ready to make a hard pivot straight into the scientific world it was caught polluting — by launching what it says will be a full-body ultrasonic scanner.

Midjourney, which currently has no outside investors or venture capital backing, announced last week that it had invested over $74 million in ultrasound manufacturer Butterfly Network to allegedly unlock a “totally new form of medical imaging” through a device it’s calling the Midjourney Scanner.

If a company known for generating AI slop looking to get into the medical imaging business raises some serious red flags, you wouldn’t be alone. Radiologists have some serious doubts about its effectiveness as an imaging tool.

Midjourney’s scanner works, it says, by submerging a patient’s body in water while passing through a “ring of ultrasonic sensors.” In its announcement, Midjourney likens the sensors to a tiny army of dolphins that use echolocation to create a detailed 3D map of the full human body.

A flashy marketing video shows a woman slowly being lowered into a red-lit, water-filled cylinder, clearly trying to evoke a sci-fi atmosphere.

Midjourney claims a full-body scan takes as little as 60 seconds, while a full-body magnetic resonance imaging scan can take more than an hour, boasting that a “spa” featuring its scanner will open in San Francisco next year. By 2031, the company pronounced, a “fleet of over 50,000 scanners” could create one billion scans a month, covering “a huge percentage of the global population.”

“We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to that — today,” the company claimed.

Midjourney remained notably vague about what the scanner can actually spot while scanning, hand-waving that “you want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible” and that people should get “as many ‘megabytes per second per dollar’ of information about your body,” without elaborating on what such data could include. (Futurism has reached out to the company for clarification.)

Midjourney’s announcement was met with plenty of skepticism from the medical community.

For one, whether such scans will have any meaningful and medically significant bearing on a patient’s health is unclear at best. Even far more involved, full-body MRI scans for healthy people — a habit celebrities are advocating — are known to result in false positives, which can lead to unnecessary and potentially risky interventions.

Then there are some hard physical limits to the tech, like the need for the elaborate water bath.

“The project has a technical basis but the device will be limited by the fundamental inability of ultrasound to penetrate through bone, air, and deep soft tissues, rendering many body parts inaccessible,” Hopkins Medicine assistant professor Francis Deng tweeted.

“Device development is expensive and they don’t have investors,” he added. “Very surprising pivot.”

New York University associate professor and breast imaging specialist Laura Heacock also threw cold water on the idea in a LinkedIn post. While she said there was a benefit to democratizing access to analyzing one’s body composition, she had her doubts about such a scanner doing anything more than that.

“I woke up today to a barrage of excited social media posts about Midjourney’s foray into… whole body ultrasound,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, the demo was a video with few facts/images, and I was left hoping for more.”

Heacock pointed out that ultrasound tomography is already commercially available for breast imaging and detecting cancer.

“The system requires the patient to submerge themselves in water,” she added. “As some people have difficulty just lying on a CT scanner (which images in seconds), this doesn’t sound that simple to me.”

The radiology expert also pointed out that AI was unlikely to be of much help, especially given existing pain points in applying the tech to medical imaging.

“I can AI-upsample a fuzzy photograph but that doesn’t mean what comes out of it actually existed,” Heacock wrote. “We have a variant of this issue already with MRI reconstruction.”

“The question remains: why would I use an experimental full body US when there’s whole body MRI available that’s already diagnostic quality?” she added.

Netizens were equally skeptical, with users likening it to Theranos, a multibillion-dollar blood-testing startup that collapsed in spectacular fashion.

Midjourney claims that its pivot “is moving at the maximum speed that’s physically possible,” implying that it was looking to skirt around government regulations — at least for now — by “just giving you detailed body composition maps,” while “submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.”

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