Midjourney Announces a Medical Scanner and a Spa in San Francisco

Midjourney, best known for image generation, has announced Midjourney Medical, a project to build a new kind of medical imaging machine and, around it, a spa. The announcement was published on the company's website.

The scanner: a minute in water

The scanner is built around a shallow pool of golden light. A person stands on a platform that descends into the water at roughly two inches, or five centimetres, per second, passing through a ring of half a million tiny squares — each about the size of a fine grain of sand and able to act as both a speaker and a microphone.

The elements emit ultrasonic waves and record the ripples that return, millions of times per second, producing terabytes of data each second — the equivalent of roughly 500 hours of HD video for every second of scan data. Because the shape of a wave changes whenever it crosses a boundary between materials of different density or stiffness, from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone, the system reconstructs an image of what is inside the body.

The goal is for a scan to take no more than 60 seconds. Midjourney says the result is a 3D map of the body down to a fraction of a millimetre, similar to today's MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed. The number of mechanical elements, the volume of data and the computing power required are, it says, the reason no such machine was built before.

The spa and the roadmap

The first Midjourney Spa is planned for the heart of San Francisco in 2027, with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and rooms where pools of golden light scan the body, open around the clock. Scans are meant to be a side effect of a place people want to visit.

The next twelve months will go into refining algorithms and hardware, running research trials, moving toward a second-generation design and building a first "research spa". The spa is to open around the end of 2027; a third-generation scanner with custom silicon is planned for 2028, alongside expansion to more cities. The stated goal for 2031 is a fleet of more than 50,000 scanners with a capacity of a billion scans a month.

Regulation and ambitions

Midjourney notes that diagnostic capabilities normally require FDA approval. The company says it is starting with detailed body composition maps and will submit regular test results to the agency as it adds capabilities.

The announcement also claims that with enough early imaging, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of healthcare costs — a projection it presents as a possibility rather than a result. Midjourney repeats that it has no investors and describes itself as a community-backed research lab funded by everyday people.