Midjourney Medical: From AI Images to Full-Body Ultrasonic CT

By Prahlad Menon 7 min read

Midjourney — the company that taught millions of people to generate AI art through Discord prompts — just announced its first hardware product. It’s not a camera. It’s not a wearable. It’s a full-body ultrasonic scanner that lowers you through a pool of water to map your insides in 60 seconds.

The company calls it the Midjourney Scanner. The division behind it is Midjourney Medical. And the distribution strategy is a spa.

What They Built

The scanner uses a ring of underwater ultrasound sensors — 8,960 transducers arranged in a configuration that surrounds your body as you descend through water on a platform. The water matters: ultrasound travels cleanly through it, allowing the body to be scanned from all angles without a handheld probe pressing against one spot.

The technical specs Midjourney claims:

  • 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules per system
  • ~2 petaflops of processing power
  • 17GB of data per second
  • 40GB of raw data per cross-sectional slice
  • Full-body scan in ~60 seconds
  • Resolution down to fractions of a millimeter

The platform lowers you at about 2 inches (5 cm) per second through a ring that Midjourney describes as containing “half a million tiny sensing elements, each acting as a speaker and microphone.” The ultrasound waves travel through your body from every angle, and the system reconstructs a 3D internal map from how those waves bend and scatter through fat, muscle, bone, and organs.

This is closer to ultrasound CT than to hospital CT (which uses X-rays) or MRI (which uses magnetic fields). No ionizing radiation. No powerful magnets. Just sound waves and water.

The Butterfly Deal

The underlying technology isn’t Midjourney’s. It’s licensed from Butterfly Network, the handheld ultrasound company that pioneered putting ultrasound sensors on semiconductor chips.

In November 2025, Midjourney signed a co-development and licensing agreement with Butterfly, taking an exclusive license (within a specified field of use) to Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip technology. The deal structure, per Butterfly’s SEC filings:

  • $15 million one-time fee
  • $10 million annual license fee (over 5 years)
  • Milestone payments up to $9 million
  • Revenue-sharing on Midjourney hardware using Butterfly chips

The core patent (US 10,525,506 B2) describes ultrasonic transducers built directly onto CMOS chips using standard semiconductor foundry processes. Each cell can both transmit and receive. The key is low-cost, high-yield manufacturing — which is what Midjourney’s mass-deployment numbers depend on.

The Spa Distribution Model

The first Midjourney Spa is planned for San Francisco’s Union Square by end of 2027. It will have:

  • 10 scanners
  • Hot tubs
  • Saunas
  • Cold plunges
  • A gym

This is the distribution strategy. Hospitals move slowly — procurement takes years, doctors need clinical evidence, the FDA doesn’t clear devices because the demo looks good. A spa lets Midjourney start with a different promise entirely.

The initial offering won’t be medical diagnosis. It’s body composition maps — repeatable scans that show changes in muscle, fat, bone, and organs over time. Think: tracking how your body responds to a new workout regimen or diet changes.

This is a deliberate regulatory positioning. Body composition data with no diagnostic claims can fall under the FDA’s general-wellness policy — the same lane that Prenuvo and Ezra’s whole-body MRI services occupy. Medical diagnosis would require FDA clearance, so the path is wellness first, then narrow medical claims one approval at a time.

The Ambition

Midjourney’s stated goal is aggressive:

  • 50,000 scanners globally by 2031
  • 1 billion full-body scans per month

David Holz (Midjourney’s CEO) said one way he’d like to use it: “I’m not the most measured man on Earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily [measurable information].” The vision is medical imaging that becomes less like a rare diagnostic test and more like a longitudinal record of your body — something you do once a year, or every month, or every day.

The economics, if the claims hold: Holz describes a prototype that’s 10× cheaper and 60× faster than traditional MRI. Where an MRI costs $400–$4,000 and takes 1–2 hours, Midjourney claims the scanner could complete a full-body scan in one minute at a cost of a few dollars.

Why Midjourney?

This makes more sense when you know Holz’s background. Before Midjourney, he co-founded Leap Motion in 2010, building optical hand-tracking hardware for VR/AR. Leap was sold to Ultrahaptics (now Ultraleap) in 2019. Holz has shipped specialized sensing hardware before.

In August 2024, Midjourney hired Ahmad Abbas — formerly a Hardware Engineering Manager on Apple’s Vision Pro — to lead its hardware division. The scanner project was internally nicknamed “Orb.”

Midjourney says it’s working on eight total projects: four software, four hardware. Two of the hardware projects are devices small enough to hold in your hands. Two are “giant awesome machines” like the scanner.

The AI Connection (Or Lack Thereof)

Here’s the thing: none of the licensed technology is generative AI. The Butterfly patents involve ultrasound sensing and image reconstruction — discriminative AI that reads a scene, not the image-generating kind Midjourney is famous for.

One Butterfly patent (US 2020/0214682) does apply machine learning to estimate an ultrasound probe’s position and guide a novice operator in real time. But that’s computer vision, not diffusion models.

The connection to Midjourney’s core business is less technical and more strategic. Adobe, Google, OpenAI, and dozens of smaller companies are crowding into the image-generation market. The margins of surprise are shrinking. A scanner network gives Midjourney something harder to copy: physical infrastructure, regulatory experience, and a stream of body data that competitors can’t scrape from the open web.

The Skeptical View

The claims need independent validation. A few realities:

Hardware punishes optimism. Midjourney has to manufacture scanners, maintain them, run wet consumer facilities, protect intimate health data, handle service failures, and win public trust in a category where one bad answer can do real damage. You can’t patch a flooded spa room from a dashboard.

The terminology is marketing. “Ultrasonic CT” is a category error — CT means X-ray computed tomography, and this uses no X-rays. “MRI-grade” stacks on a second mismatch, since MRI uses magnetic fields, not sound. Both phrases read as marketing coinage rather than physics.

Regulatory clearance takes time. Midjourney says it will submit test results to the FDA “over time” for increased capabilities. The gap between a prototype and a regulated medical device is considerable. The 510(k) process has its own timeline.

About a dozen people have been scanned so far. That’s the number Holz mentioned. This is early.

The Bigger Bet

Midjourney is trying to turn the body into the next image dataset.

If they can collect repeated ultrasound scans tied to changes in a person’s body over time, that data could become more valuable than the spa or even the scanner itself. A billion scans a month sounds less like a wellness membership plan and more like an anatomy data engine.

Whether real people are willing to step into the water — and whether the technology delivers what’s promised — should become clearer when the San Francisco spa opens in late 2027.

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Announced: June 17, 2026