Midjourney Launches a Medical Division and a 60-Second Full-Body Scanner
The AI image company is moving into healthcare with "Midjourney Medical" — an ultrasonic whole-body scanner it plans to offer through its own wellness spas rather than clinics, starting in San Francisco in 2027.
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Midjourney, the company best known for its AI image generator, has announced a new division called Midjourney Medical and unveiled the product behind it: a scanner designed to image the entire human body in about 60 seconds using sound waves and water.
Framing the launch as “a new era,” the company said it wants to build something “as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa.” Its stated goal is to give people frequent, low-cost data about their own bodies — what it describes as optimizing for “megabytes per second per dollar” of health information — so they can track how their health changes over time and act on it earlier.
The Midjourney Scanner
The experience, as Midjourney describes it, begins by stepping into a shallow pool of “golden light.” A platform on rails then lowers you into the water at about 5 centimeters (2 inches) per second, passing your body through a ring of underwater sensors.
That ring, the company says, is made of half a million tiny squares, each the size of a grain of sand and each acting as both a miniature speaker and microphone. They send ultrasonic waves through the body from every angle — “like a dolphin using echolocation” — and listen for how the waves change as they pass through water, skin, fat, muscle, and bone. From those changes, the system reconstructs a 3-D map of the body down to a fraction of a millimeter, which Midjourney says resembles an MRI image but is produced at nearly 100 times the speed.
The scanner generates terabytes of data per second — the equivalent, by the company’s comparison, of 500 hours of HD video for every second of scanning. Reconstructing that data into images, streamed to a cluster of thousands of computers, is described as the central technical challenge. Individual scan slices are paired with AI segmentation that labels what is inside the body.
The Midjourney Spa
Rather than launching through hospitals, Midjourney plans to introduce the scanner inside a new venture called the Midjourney Spa. The first location is slated to open in San Francisco in 2027.
The spa will offer hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and “cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body,” and is intended to operate 24/7. The company frames the scan itself as almost incidental: “The scans are a side-effect. You barely think of them when going to the spa. But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.”
The Roadmap
Midjourney laid out an aggressive timeline:
- Next 12 months: refining hardware and algorithms, running research trials, moving toward a second-generation design, and building a first “research spa.”
- End of 2027: open the first public Spa in San Francisco.
- 2028: expand to more cities and upgrade to a third-generation scanner with fully custom silicon.
- By 2031: a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide, with capacity for one billion scans a month — enough, the company says, to give regular monthly scans to a billion people.
On regulation, Midjourney says it will start by offering body-composition maps, which do not require FDA approval, and will submit test results to the FDA over time to unlock additional diagnostic capabilities.
The Bigger Pitch
Midjourney’s stated ambition reaches well beyond body composition. The company claims that with enough early imaging, “the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs” — figures it presents as the long-term promise of routine, casual scanning.
The company also emphasized its unusual structure: Midjourney says it has no investors and describes itself as a “community-backed research lab” funded by everyday people. It is inviting that community to weigh in on what the scanners and spas should become, and says it has further projects to announce.
Details: Based on Midjourney’s announcement, “A New Era of Midjourney.” Timelines, sensor counts, scan capacity, and the health-outcome figures cited are the company’s own projections for technology that is still in development; the scanner has no FDA clearance for diagnostic use and will launch offering body-composition maps rather than diagnosis.
Disclaimer
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health.
