Midjourney, the company famous for turning typed words into AI images, has gone full-pivot to unveil a full-body medical scanner. So why is an AI art company is suddenly talking about the human body?
Late last week, Midjourney announced a new arm called Midjourney Medical, with a prototype machine it calls The Midjourney Scanner, and a plan to open public scanning “spas”. The name it has given the technology, “Ultrasonic CT”, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, as experts have highlighted.
What it actually is
You stand on a platform that lowers you into a shallow pool of water. As you descend, you pass through a ring of tiny sensors that fire sound waves through your body from every angle, and software stitches the echoes back into cross-sectional slices and a 3D map. There’s no radiation and no magnetic field. Just sound and water.
It’s ultrasound, in other words, the same technology used in pregnancy scans, scaled up to the whole body. The sensors at its core are licensed from a listed firm, Butterfly Network. Midjourney says the ring holds about half a million of them, and that the result is a map “down to a fraction of a millimetre” that “looks a lot like today’s MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed”. Those are the company’s own figures, not independently tested ones.
What it can, and can’t, do
For now, not much. What Midjourney is actually launching is a body-composition map, fat, muscle and water, closer to a high-end body-fat scale than to a diagnostic scan. That’s also why it needs no US regulatory clearance yet. It isn’t claiming to find disease.
There’s a physical catch, too. Ultrasound can’t travel through bone or air, so the lungs, the brain and anything tucked behind the ribs or spine are largely out of reach. Midjourney’s own sample images leave out the brain entirely.
Ultimately, Midjourney Medical’s speed is the big breakthrough goal here. Only about a dozen people have been scanned so far, but each scan takes around 20 minutes, not the advertised 60 seconds.
Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical" pic.twitter.com/c14YcO6yaU
— Midjourney (@midjourney) June 18, 2026
Radiologists who have seen the demonstration have been cautious, noting that nothing shown so far matches the quality of an existing MRI or CT.
So why is an art company doing this?
Midjourney doesn’t call itself an image generator. It calls itself a research lab. Founder David Holz’s pitch is that staying healthy “comes down to having data” about your own body, and that the prize is cheap, fast imaging you can repeat often and track over time.
Holz also says the machine is “not even using any AI in this yet”. It’s hardware and signal processing, with AI used only to label the pictures afterwards.
Midjourney is privately held and says it takes no outside investment, so there’s no Midjourney stock to buy. The only listed company in the picture is Butterfly Network (NYSE: BFLY), the chip supplier. It licensed its sensors to Midjourney in a deal worth up to about US$74 million over five years, and its shares jumped about 56 per cent on the day of the announcement.
Midjourney says it will keep submitting results to US regulators in pursuit of added capabilities, and aims to open its first scanning spa in San Francisco by the end of 2027.
