🔊 Midjourney is building a body scanner that maps the entire body in 60 seconds

• A full-body scan with today's MRI takes 60 to 90 minutes. Midjourney's new machine aims to do the same thing in under 60 seconds.
• The scanner uses a ring of half a million tiny elements that send ultrasound through the body from every direction.
• The result is a 3D map of the body down to fractions of a millimeter, about a hundred times faster than an MRI.

A new project from an AI company

Midjourney is best known for its AI program that creates images from text. Now the company is entering an entirely new field and presenting Midjourney Medical. The first product is a scanner that aims to map the entire body.

The company describes the goal as something as powerful as an MRI, but as everyday as a trip to the spa.

How the scanner works

You step onto a platform in a shallow pool of water. The platform slowly lowers you into the water, about 2 inches per second.

On the way down you pass through a ring made up of half a million small squares. Each square is roughly the size of a grain of sand. Each square can both send out ultrasound and pick up the echo that bounces back from the body.

Midjourney compares the squares to dolphins that use echolocation. Going through a scan then becomes like being surrounded by half a million tiny dolphins from every angle.

The sound waves change shape as they pass through different parts of the body, such as skin, fat, muscle, and bone. By reading how the waves change, a detailed image of the body's interior is built up. The image resembles an MRI, but the scan is meant to take under 60 seconds.

Collaboration and technology

The machine is being developed together with Butterfly Network, which makes handheld ultrasound devices. Midjourney signed a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network in November 2025 and gained exclusive rights to the company's ultrasound-on-chip technology.

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

The scanner is placed in spas

Midjourney is building its scanners together with another new product, a spa. The first facility is set to open in San Francisco in 2027.

The spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and rooms with pools of golden light where the body is scanned. The idea is that it should be a place you want to visit even without the scan. The scan itself becomes a side effect, but over time the visitor accumulates a large amount of data about their health.

The plan going forward

Over the next twelve months, the company will fine-tune the technology and algorithms, run research trials, and develop a second generation of the hardware.

The next step is to get the machine's diagnostic capabilities approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. Midjourney is starting by providing detailed maps of body composition and submitting test results to the FDA on an ongoing basis for additional functions.

In 2028, the company wants to expand to more cities and launch a third generation of the machine with custom-built chips for better image quality.

The goal is to have more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031, with capacity for a billion scans a month. That is enough to give a billion people a scan every month.

Midjourney writes that early imaging could allow the world to avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all healthcare costs.

Not medically tested

The device has not yet been tested or approved by any authority.

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