Midjourney is building a full-body ultrasound scanner — and plans to put it in a spa

By: Anton Kratiuk | today, 17:57

Midjourney — known for AI-generated images — announced a medical hardware division on June 18, 2026, called Midjourney Medical. The product is a full-body ultrasonic scanner that uses 500,000 sound-wave transducers and completes a scan in 60 seconds, with no radiation and no MRI-style magnets. The catch: the company plans to sell it as a spa experience, not a clinical tool — a framing that raises real questions about what the scans actually tell you.

The hardware

The scanner uses water to conduct ultrasound waves across the entire body, then reconstructs a 3D image using AI. Midjourney licensed Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip technology for $15 million upfront. The company claims the results are comparable to MRI in resolution, but no peer-reviewed clinical data has been published to support that. Testing so far has compared the scanner against synthetic phantoms and a single MRI side-by-side — not against real patients in a clinical setting.

The spa angle

The first location opens in San Francisco in late 2027. Midjourney envisions it as a flagship wellness spa — hot tubs, sauna, cold plunge — with 10 scanners installed alongside. The company claims those 10 machines could collectively perform more scans per year than every MRI scanner on Earth combined, which is mathematically plausible given the 60-second cycle time.

The long-term target is 50,000 scanners globally and one billion scans per month by 2031. At that scale, the dataset becomes the real product: training AI to detect abnormalities in asymptomatic people before symptoms appear.

The regulatory gap

Midjourney is deliberately launching under an FDA general-wellness label rather than seeking diagnostic device clearance. That means the initial scans will produce "body composition maps" — not clinical diagnoses. The company says it will submit incremental results for diagnostic clearance over time.

This framing is familiar territory for regulators. The American College of Radiology has warned that whole-body screening in asymptomatic people lacks clinical evidence — the same burden Midjourney's scanner will need to meet. The wellness imaging market already includes Prenuvo and Ezra, both of which face similar scrutiny. No scan pricing has been disclosed.

What to watch

If the clinical validation arrives, this is a genuinely interesting improvement in accessible imaging. If it doesn't, a 60-second spa scan with no diagnostic standing is a premium product that tells you very little. The company's published strategy acknowledges this gap — starting with non-diagnostic output is explicitly described as a way to manage the FDA pathway, not an end goal.