Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

The underlying technology is real... and borrowed from a partner the company failed to mention Brandon Vigliarolo Brandon Vigliarolo Published thu // UTC A San Francisco startup best known for its AI-generation software is making a bizarre leap into medical imaging, and trying to says it hopes draw curiosity-seekers into its new spa to get scanned. On Wednesday, Midjourney announced the establishment of Midjourney Medical, which it admitted was a bit out of left field. To promote the tech, it claims to be opening a spa in San Francisco where guests will be able to step “into a shallow pool of golden light,” before being lowered into a tank where ultrasound sensors bombard their bodies in order to take a scan that AI pieces together into MRI-like images. It’s not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute.  “We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs,” the company added.  According to a “technical” video included in the announcement, there’s a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney’s dunk tank up to a thousand times a second.  The Midjourney Scanner, as the company has named it, can capture tissue details up to half a millimeter, which is on par with standard clinical MRIs, but pales in comparison to the resolution of more advanced designs. A processed image of the midsection of a human body scanned : Midjourney Medical Oh, did we not mention our partner? Midjourney said its scanner is the first of its kind ever constructed, but the technical video says it relies on Fullbody Ultrasound Computational Tomography (FUCT, or USCT, as the industry has taken to calling it to avoid the more questionable acronym). Fast, full-body ultrasound scanning that requires patients to be submerged in a water tank has been an active project at Caltech based on a research paper from earlier this year.  Same goes for the sensors Midjourney is including in its scanner. You wouldn’t know that from reading the announcement, which makes it seem like this was a project entirely of Midjourney’s own AI fever dreams, but ultrasound tech firm Butterfly Network was compelled to issue its own press release “following Midjourney’s public announcement” in order to “provide commentary” on the AI outfit’s new venture.  Butterfly confirmed in its release that it provided the 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the Midjourney Scanner.