This AI company wants to replace MRIs with a 60-second dip in the spa. Can that really work?

By Christine Ji

Midjourney is making a foray into healthcare with its latest body-scanner product, aiming to make medical imaging more accessible

Midjourney aims to debut its body scanners to consumers at a flagship brick-and-mortar wellness spa in San Francisco by the end of 2027.

The artificial-intelligence startup Midjourney made a name for itself by generating surreal internet art. Now, it's setting its sights on the physical world with a new full-body scanner that aims to push the boundaries of modern medicine.

On Wednesday evening, the company unveiled a new Midjourney Medical division featuring its first hardware product, the Midjourney scanner.

The scanner aims to compete with more cumbersome MRI imaging by utilizing a shallow pool of water and sonic-wave technology to map the human body in roughly 60 seconds. As users are lowered into the water, a ring made of microscopic squares creates and records ultrasonic waves. The data is then sent to supercomputer clusters, where it's transformed into images.

The company showed a physical prototype at the launch event on Wednesday. Midjourney founder David Holz is aiming for a fleet of 50,000 scanners running 1 billion scans a month by 2031, starting with an in-person spa location in San Francisco by the end of 2027.

Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, weighed in on Midjourney's medical-imaging ambitions. The body scanner is similar to an ultrasound imaging test, and "taking it to the next level is a good idea," Topol told MarketWatch. However, he added, he's still "somewhat skeptical."

Calling Midjourney's current product a "full-body" scan akin to an MRI is misleading because ultrasound technology cannot penetrate through thick bone structures to provide images of brain tissue, Topol noted.

Topol sees Midjourney's scanner competing more with DEXA scans, which analyze bone, muscle mass and fat. Traditionally, DEXA scans have been ordered by physicians, but in recent years, a burgeoning direct-to-consumer market has emerged amid a surge of interest in longevity and wellness.

The underlying technology powering Midjourney's scanner relies on medical-device company Butterfly Network (BFLY). Following Midjourney's announcement, Butterfly confirmed that each scanner prototype embeds 40 of its proprietary Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules.

When MarketWatch reached out for comment, Holz pointed to a 2020 peer-reviewed paper from NPJ Digital Medicine titled "Full-Waveform Inversion Imaging of the Human Brain" which found that a technique called full-waveform inversion can indeed convert raw wave data from ultrasounds into detailed brain images.

Full-waveform inversion was first widely applied in geophysics and heavily developed by the petroleum industry to look for underground oil and gas reserves. However, it was long deemed commercially impractical for medical use due to the staggering compute workloads required to translate acoustic waves into three-dimensional images. But that's now changing with the massive buildout of supercomputing clusters triggered by the AI boom.

The company's scanner is not FDA-approved for medical diagnoses. To speed up the development and distribution of the technology, Midjourney is launching the device for body-composition maps initially, with the intent to hold continued discussions with the FDA.

Nisha Mehta, a radiologist and founder of the Physician Side Gigs community, was impressed and cautiously optimistic about Midjourney's imaging capabilities.

While MRIs can provide detailed full-body imaging, they also come with downsides: The scans are expensive, claustrophobic and can take up to an hour.

"To be clear, I'm not an advocate for deploying party tricks at a spa and using it to guide medical advice or care," Mehta wrote in a LinkedIn post. "And if (and I agree it's a big if) the tech can be improved to the point where you could address some issues related with MRI in terms of cost, time, claustrophobia, wait times, access - the potential for impact is not insignificant when in the hands of people who understand the science and are trained to interpret images."

-Christine Ji

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06-18-26 1922ET