MidJourney, known for its AI program that can generate images from text prompts, has announced its new project: a medical machine that can scan your entire body in just 60 seconds. This is so far from what Midjourney is known for, we had to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Well, this isn’t April Fools: The MidJourney scanner is real, and the company is even building spas where you can find the machines and get scanned.
In its announcement, Midjourney acknowledged that the project is unrelated to anything we’ve seen from the company so far. However, it’s at the point where it’s asking itself “How do we want to be different?” and “What do we want to become?” The answer to these questions, apparently, is the launch of MidJourney Medical, with the scanner as its first hardware product. “We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as an MRI and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to it today,” it wrote in its blog post.
After you step onto a platform, MidJourney’s scanner will submerge you in water at a rate of 2 inches per second. Your body passes through a ring made up of five million squares the size of a grain of sand, each of which is capable of emitting ultrasonic waves and recording the waves that bounce back from your body.
The company compares them to dolphins that use echolocation, so going through a scan is like being surrounded by half a million tiny dolphins from every angle. It says the result of the scan is “a 3D map of your body down to a fraction of a millimeter, which looks like today’s MRI but at about a hundred times the speed.” MidJourney aims for scans to take less than 60 seconds, a fraction of the 60 to 90 minutes it typically takes to perform a whole-body MRI.
As crypto briefing Note, the company is developing the machine with handheld ultrasound device maker Butterfly Network. MidJourney signed a licensing agreement with Butterfly Network in November 2025, securing exclusive rights to its ultrasound-on-chip technology. The project is led by Ahmed Abbas, MidJourney’s head of consumer hardware projects, who joined the company in late 2023 after working on the Vision Pro at Apple.
Over the next 12 months, MidJourney will fine-tune its algorithms and scanners, conduct research tests, and work on second-generation hardware designs. It plans to open its first spa housing scanners in San Francisco sometime next year. The next step is to get the machine’s diagnostic capabilities approved by the FDA. In 2028, MidJourney hopes to expand to more cities and launch its third generation machine that will use custom silicon to enable better image quality. It says that’s when things will get “serious”, perhaps in relation to how the scanner can compete with standard MRI.
MidJourney’s ambition is to have 50,000 scanners available worldwide by 2031. The company said, “We think it’s entirely possible that with adequate early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all health care costs.”
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