Midjourney, the company best known for its AI-generated images, is moving into an unexpected new field: medical hardware. CEO David Holz has unveiled the company’s first device, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner called The Midjourney Scanner, along with plans for a San Francisco wellness space he describes as a spa.
Holz acknowledged the leap from AI-generated “cat pictures” to body scanning, but said the goal is ambitious. The system is designed to capture vertical slices of the body using a ring of sensors, with an initial focus on measuring the composition of muscle, fat, bone, and organs. According to Holz, the long-term aim is to deliver image quality that is comparable to MRI in many respects.
He suggested the scanner could be used as often as once a year or even daily, depending on the user’s goals. As an example, Holz said he would like to track how his body changes in response to shifts in diet and exercise. Job listings tied to the project describe the broader mission as building “the world’s first full-body ultrasound CT scanner” and eventually bringing “safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.”
The device was developed in partnership with Butterfly Network, an ultrasound technology company. Butterfly said each system uses 40 of its Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules.
The scanning process begins with a person stepping onto a platform that lowers into water on rails. From there, the body passes through a ring containing thousands of transducers, which generate ultrasonic waves and record how those waves move through the body. That data is then used to produce detailed 3D images. Holz said a scan is expected to take about 60 seconds, and that roughly a dozen people have been scanned so far.
Midjourney says the system also relies on two petaflops of processing power. Even so, the connection between the company’s image-generation business and this new medical venture remains somewhat unclear beyond the possibility of applying its computing resources and technical infrastructure to a different industry.
Holz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square that will open before the end of 2027, and offered to scan the hands of attendees at its launch event. The Midjourney Spa will have a gym, saunas, and cold plunges to go along with the hot tub-equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned.
He did mention that various medical applications would require FDA clearances, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging. It also says the “library of scans” users create can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or others, and that “We take data privacy seriously — more details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”
Holz suggested that eventually these scans could become better than an MRI, without radiation, powerful magnets, or other complicating factors, to get a look at what’s going on inside people’s bodies “real fast.” In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at “weird” things and allowed people to “just try to get as much data as we can.”
