Many wondered why Midjourney seemed stagnant in image generation while competitors like OpenAI and Google were moving forward. The answer came on June 18, 2026, and it has little to do with drawing. David Holz’s company announced Midjourney Medical and a device it calls Ultrasonic CT: a scanner that promises to map your entire body with ultrasound, without radiation, while you rest inside a pool of warm water.
A mind-boggling but dubious promise
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
The company we knew for creating images with artificial intelligence has just entered medicine with a full-body scanner. The idea is exciting. The fine data call for calm.
The plan sounds like something out of a science fiction series. You climb onto a platform that descends slowly into a water tank.
A ring surrounds you with hundreds of thousands of tiny frames, each the size of a fine grain of sand, which function as both speakers and microphones. Water and sound do the rest.
On your way out, Midjourney says you’ll have a three-dimensional map of your organs, muscles, and bones, similar to an MRI, but at nearly a hundred times the speed.
The first Midjourney Spa, with saunas, hot tubs, and cold soaking baths, is set to open in San Francisco by the end of 2027. Even Elon Musk responded under the announcement with a single word: Cool.
Before daydreaming, it is convenient to separate what is confirmed from what is still a goal on paper. And there the story becomes more interesting than it seems.
What’s True
The ad is real and comes from Midjourney itself, not from a fake account or a parody. It is published on its official website and was covered by media such as The Verge and Bloomberg.
The company created a medical division, presented a prototype and plans to open its first spa with ten scanners.
Its stated ambition is enormous: fifty thousand machines spread around the world and one billion scans per month by 2031.
They argue that fewer than a dozen of these machines could do more full-body scans a year than all the MRI machines on the planet combined.
There is a detail that almost no one mentioned and that changes the story. Midjourney did not invent imaging technology.
He licensed it from Butterfly Network, a publicly traded company that manufactures ultrasound chips. According to a document that Butterfly filed with the U.S. stock market regulator in November 2025, Midjourney pays an initial fifteen million dollars, ten million annually for five years, and other payments for use.
For now, the device does not use artificial intelligence, only very good hardware and software. The AI-famous company built its big medical bet without AI inside.
What is still a promise
Almost all of the flashy numbers are goals, not proven achievements. Sixty seconds of scanning is still a goal: current prototypes take about twenty minutes.
The sub-millimeter resolution and the idea of outperforming MRI do not appear in any peer-reviewed studies. When the announcement was made, barely a dozen people had passed through the machine, and it showed mostly renders and offered to scan the hands of the attendees.
The number of sensors does not add up between sources either. Marketing speaks of half a million items, several publications repeat 8,960 and one media cited about 358,000.
The Verge reported that each scanner uses forty Butterfly chip modules. None of those figures have been independently validated. The device also does not have approval from the US health agency, the FDA.
Midjourney plans to launch it first as a body composition map, which shows fat, muscle and bone without diagnosing diseases, to avoid the most demanding regulatory path for now.
Physics rules
Ultrasound is cheap, fast, and doesn’t use radiation, so it’s appealing. But it has two physical enemies: air and bone, which bounce sound. That’s why seeing the brain behind the skull or air-filled lungs is still a serious problem. The best ultrasound tomography system published in a scientific journal, developed at Caltech by Lihong Wang’s team and published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in April 2026, achieves about one millimeter of resolution in a single slice of the body, but takes about twelve minutes to reconstruct each slice and only reaches the abdomen and thighs. The promise of a full body in a minute is far ahead of what has been demonstrated.
The debate that really matters
Even if the machine were to work tomorrow, the underlying question would remain: should healthy people without symptoms be scanned? The American College of Radiology does not recommend full-body scanning in asymptomatic people, and studies explain why.
Searching inside any body almost always finds something, and most of those findings are benign. The problem is the cascade that comes later: more tests, biopsies, scares and expenses for things that were never going to hurt. Doctors call these accidental findings incidentalomas.
There are serious defenders of the other position. Dan Sodickson, a researcher and scientific adviser to the Ezra company, argues that a repeated annual image would work like a movie rather than a single photo, and allow you to see how the body changes over time.
Such active surveillance could change medicine from reactive to preventative. Midjourney does not enter an empty field: it competes with Neko Health, the firm of the co-founder of Spotify, with Prenuvo and with Ezra itself, which already charge between 300 and 2,500 dollars for preventive scans. Their difference is the luxury spa wrapping and the goal that a day costs only a few dollars.
The deepest stake may not be health but data.
A billion scans a month would form the largest archive of human anatomy ever assembled.
That would be where the artificial intelligence that Midjourney knows well would fit in later on.
In short, Midjourney Medical announced a device it calls Ultrasonic CT: a scanner that promises to map your entire body with ultrasound, without radiation, while you rest inside a pool of warm water.
For now, it is advisable to look with curiosity and calmly. The initiative is real, the basic science exists and the problem it attacks, detecting diseases earlier, is genuine. But between the render and the room of a spa with a radiologist reviewing images there is a long way. The future of health will be fascinating. It has not yet arrived.
References
Business Standard. (2026, June 18). AI startup Midjourney pivots to health with full-body ultrasound machine. https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/ai-startup-midjourney-pivots-to-health-with-full-body-ultrasound-machine-126061800614_1.html
Garrett, J., Xu, Y., Oh, S., et al. (2026). Whole cross-sectional human ultrasound tomography. Nature Biomedical Engineering. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4
Midjourney. (2026). Midjourney Medical. https://www.midjourney.com/medical
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2025, November 17). Butterfly Network, Inc. Current Report (Form 8-K).
