Midjourney launches Ultrasonic CT to produce MRI-like scans

Midjourney announced the creation of Midjourney Medical and described a full-body imaging system it calls “Ultrasonic CT.” The company says the scanner will combine ultrasound hardware, a water chamber and large-scale AI to produce three-dimensional images in roughly 60 seconds.

The proposed scanner places a person inside a water-filled chamber and lowers them through a ring lined with about 500,000 tiny ultrasonic transmitters and receivers. The elements would take turns sending and receiving sound waves, compress the returned signals and stream data to a computing cluster where AI algorithms reconstruct the image, according to the company. Midjourney says the system would avoid ionizing radiation and strong magnetic fields used in CT and MRI machines.

Midjourney contrasted the target 60-second scans with conventional full-body MRI exams, which typically take 30 minutes or longer.

The company plans to introduce the technology at a wellness facility called Midjourney Spa, scheduled to open in San Francisco in late 2027. The spa will include hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and dedicated scanning rooms, with expansion planned in 2028. Midjourney set a deployment goal of about 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years and said it intends to use the network to perform a billion full-body scans per month.

Over the next year, Midjourney Medical plans research trials, hardware refinement and improvements to its image-reconstruction algorithms. The company expects to initially offer body composition maps while it pursues regulatory approvals for diagnostic use and carries out algorithm validation and clinical studies.

Midjourney began in 2022 as a text-to-image AI platform and is expanding into medical imaging hardware and wellness services. The announcement reflects a broader trend of AI developers moving into healthcare, though many projects to date have focused on software for clinical workflows, records and research rather than new sensor hardware.

In a company statement, Midjourney wrote, “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, “We hope with this announcement you start to see that Midjourney is a research lab that’s constantly asking what we can build for people, and what we can change within the foundations of the human experience.”