en.Wedoany.com Reported - On June 17, US-based Midjourney, known for its image-generating AI, announced its official entry into the healthcare sector, launching a new business called "Midjourney Medical" centered around an ultrasound full-body scanner and a warm bath facility integrating the scanner, named "Midjourney Spa."
The full-body scanner works by having a person stand in a shallow "golden light pool," slowly lowering their body through a ring-shaped device equipped with approximately 500,000 tiny elements. Each element emits ultrasound waves from different angles, reconstructing the internal body structure in 3D based on changes in the echoes. A full-body scan can be completed in 60 seconds, with image quality approaching that of MRI, and is about 100 times faster than MRI.
The following day, US-based Butterfly Network (a company specializing in semiconductor ultrasound chips) announced it would be the hardware partner for the scanner. According to the company, each existing prototype integrates 40 ultrasound chip modules, and the two parties have signed a joint development agreement, with plans to significantly increase the number of modules in future generations. Butterfly Network CEO Joseph DeVivo described the scanner as a "next-generation device-side AI."
Midjourney Spa is positioned as a venue integrating the scanner into daily life. The first location is planned to open in downtown San Francisco in 2027, featuring 24-hour accessible saunas and cold plunge pools, with full-body scanning offered as an ancillary feature.
The timeline is as follows: first, algorithm and hardware improvements within 12 months, transitioning to a third-generation product with fully custom silicon by 2028, and by 2031, plans to deploy over 50,000 units globally, achieving the capacity for 1 billion scans per month. Since diagnostic functions require FDA approval, the short-term plan is to start by providing body composition mapping.
Before founding Midjourney, CEO David Holtz co-founded US-based Leap Motion in 2010 and served as its CTO, a company that tracked hand and finger movements using sensors. Given his background in achieving sub-millimeter precision tracking in optical sensors and computer vision, the idea of using a large number of sensor elements and massive computing to reconstruct signals into images is closer to his "origin" in sensor hardware rather than image-generating AI.
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