Midjourney, the AI Image Generator Company, is Making an MRI Scanner

Midjourney has been largely surpassed in the AI image world by tech behemoths Google and OpenAI. But today it’s made a surprise announcement: it’s getting into health.

Called Midjourney Medical, the company is launching into hardware with a futuristic device that is designed to be stepped into so it can make a body scan.

Midjourney says its machine costs a fraction of the price of a traditional MRI scanner, and only takes 60 seconds versus the 60 minutes it usually takes.

“We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” Midjourney says in an announcement. “We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as an MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa.”

Midjourney explains that “it starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.”

When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water – an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the ripples back at millions of times per second. Together they act as both a choir and an audience – producing terabytes of data each second. If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every 1 second of scan data.

The sheer number of mechanical elements, the inconceivable volume of data, and the computational power required for this to all come together is one reason why no such machine was ever made – until now.

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.

The major computational task is figuring out how to change waves into images. Basically – as waves travel through the water and your body they change shape. The shape of these waves changes whenever there is a change in density or stiffness (i.e., going from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone). 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.

All of these images come together to cover a 3D map of your body, down to a fraction of a millimeter, that looks a lot like today’s MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed.”

Midjourney envisions these machines at spas and has announced that it is building its own spa in downtown San Francisco. It’s expected to open in 2027.

Image credits: Midjourney