Midjourney works with a full body ultrasonic scanner

One of the popular ideas related to artificial intelligence is that it will pave the way for cheaper, more advanced medical tests. The movie version of this is a home machine like an MRI, where the main character gets inside it and gets a full body scan and examination within minutes (remember the healing of the med-bay in Elysium?).

Now, Midjourney, a company known primarily for its powerful AI image generation technology, is trying to turn that dream into reality with a new project: a full-body, ultrasonic scanner.

Yes, we are talking about a real, full-size, medical scanner, and it is so far from what Midjourney has done so far, that in the introduction blog post, the company itself admitted that the project is “a little weird and a little crazy, but also amazing and full of hope.”

The Midjourney Scanner project is in the early stages. The company says it will work like this: You enter the platform, which slowly submerges your body in the water. A ring of underwater sensors sends ultrasonic waves to your body, and creates a picture of everything that happens inside it (the technology is related to how dolphins use echolocation to explore their surroundings underwater).

The whole process should not take more than 60 seconds; which is much faster than traditional MRI, which requires 60 to 90 minutes to perform a full body scan.

The key – and this is where Midjourney’s AI technology comes in – is in the terabytes of data generated by sensors every second of a scan. The company’s post is short on details, but it says the scanner will need massive processing power and AI intelligence to convert sound waves into images. Once that’s done, you’ll get a more accurate 3D map of your body — and much faster than an MRI.

And, according to Crypto Briefing, Midjourney isn’t traveling alone; in 2025, the company signed a license agreement with Butterfly Network, a company specializing in handheld ultrasonic scanners. Also noteworthy is the head of Midjourney Hardware, Ahmad Abbas, who previously worked on Vision Pro at Apple.

Midjourney says it is moving the project forward at “the fastest pace physically possible.” In reality, this means that the first Midjourney Spa with hot tubs, saunas, and Midjourney scanners, should open “in the heart of San Francisco” in 2027. The idea is that you can enjoy the company’s spa services as you would at any other spa, but you can also walk freely with a complete scan of your body, as well as a “huge library of health data.”

Welcome to the spa, enjoy your time here, and don’t forget to take your scan.
Credit: Midjourney

Before it can open a commercial facility like this, Midjourney will have to spend the next 12 months refining algorithms and hardware, then build a “research spa,” upgrade to a second-generation scanner, and get FDA approval for the project. If all goes well, by 2028, Midjourney Spas could start opening in more cities, and that’s also when the company hopes to upgrade to a third-generation spa. “Gen3 is where it gets ‘hard,’ the silicon for this design will be completely customizable and the image quality and scan times will be around the clock,” the post said.

By 2031, Midjourney’s goal is to have a network of more than 50,000 scanners worldwide, with a monthly scanning capacity of one billion. It’s a very ambitious goal for a company that has yet to produce any hardware, let alone medical hardware. Midjourney says it will document its journey (sorry) by publishing regular updates about the project; beyond that, Mdjourney says there will be “exciting projects” to show in the future.