From AI Art to the Operating Room: Midjourney Unveils Supersonic Medical Scanner

Midjourney, the platform renowned for its generative AI image creation, has announced a significant strategic pivot. At an event in San Francisco, founder David Holz unveiled not a new artistic AI model, but the company's first hardware device: a full-body ultrasound scanner capable of mapping the human body in just 60 seconds. This new technology is reportedly 100 times faster than conventional MRI equipment.

The announcement also marked the debut of Midjourney Medical, a new division aiming to integrate preventative medicine into daily life, akin to visiting a hairdresser. The device, named "The Midjourney Scanner," requires users to stand on a platform that slowly descends into a warm water pool. Within this pool, a ring equipped with half a million sand-grain-sized sensors uses ultrasound waves to construct a 3D map of the body's interior. Holz likened the sensors' function to the echolocation used by dolphins to navigate and perceive their surroundings.

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Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the echoes back millions of times per second. Together they act as a choir and an audience at the same time, producing terabytes of data every second.

Each sensor can act as both an emitter and receiver of ultrasound waves. The company explains that these sensors generate and record echoes millions of times per second, producing terabytes of data. This data, when converted to high-definition video, would equate to 500 hours of footage for every second of scan data. As the waves travel through water and the body, their form changes based on variations in density and rigidity, such as the transition from water to skin, fat, muscle, and bone. By analyzing these wave-form changes, the system reconstructs a detailed map, revealing internal structures with a precision of a fraction of a millimeter, comparable to current MRI scans.

To achieve this technical feat, Midjourney partnered with Butterfly Network, licensing their "ultrasound-on-chip" technology. Each scanner incorporates 40 of these modules, powered by two petaflops of processing capability to convert the complex sound wave data into clear images. However, the innovation extends beyond the technology itself to its business model. Midjourney is not targeting hospitals or private clinics for sales. Instead, it plans to establish its own chain of "Midjourney Spas," with the first location set to open in Union Square.

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As the waves travel through the water and of your body, they change shape. The shape of these waves changes every time there is a change in density or stiffness (for example, when passing from water to skin, to fat, to muscle and bone). By observing how the shape of all the waves changes, we reconstruct a detailed map or 'image' that basically allows us to discover what is inside.