Midjourney says its ultrasonic CT prototype is designed with 40 Butterfly Networks ultrasound chips arranged in a ring around a standing human for rapid imaging. [Image courtesy of Midjourney]
“There is no radiation, no powerful magnetic fields – just sound and water and 60 seconds,” the company says about its Midjourney Medical plan.
“It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light,” the company said. “You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.”
I wouldn’t be sharing this with you if not for the involvement of Butterfly Network, which has a co-development and licensing deal with Midjourney worth up to $74 million for the ultrasound-on-chip developer over five years.
Butterfly Network President, CEO and Chair Joseph DeVivo called it a “potentially meaningful commercial opportunity for Butterfly,” and his company’s stock got a big boost from the news.
Medical device professionals will immediately rack up a long list of R&D, regulatory and commercialization barriers, not to mention the well documented patient safety issues from overimaging and the potential to add more stress on understaffed radiologists from patients seeking to verify anomalies in these spa scans.
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“It’s real,” Butterfly VP and Head of Global Quality and Regulatory Affairs Nathan Sabich said of the announcement on LinkedIn. “It uses our Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip technology which is already scientifically proven … and we’re going to help make it more of a reality with scientifically valid clinical data to support any claims (as applicable).”
What might those claims be? Midjourney’s announcement says they’re aiming for “whole-body imaging that’s in many ways superior to even MRI machines,” but they’re not promising diagnostics yet.
“Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval,” Midjourney said. “We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.”
Midjourney says its ultrasonic CT imaging could map an individual person’s internal anatomy. [Image courtesy of Midjourney]
But if this is a way to divert some of that venture capital funding from the LLM frenzy and back toward medtech innovation, I’m happy to wait and see. And we might not have to wait long.
Midjourney says it will focus over the next 12 months on refining its algorithms and hardware, conducting research trials and moving toward second-generation hardware.
“We’ll do build-out for our first ‘research spa’ which will become the promethean site that enables mass-scale health scanning,” the company said. “Around the end of 2027 we’ll open up the Spa, and we’ll begin getting real world knowledge of what this infrastructure is going to be like.”
The next year, Midjourney says it will expand to more cities and launch a third-gen scanner. “The silicon for this design will be completely custom and image quality and scan times will be night-and-day.”
“Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide – with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month – enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people,” the company continued.
This still from Midjourney’s promotional video depicts the scanner tank that a person would be lowered into for ultrasonic CT imaging. Midjourney did not say whether this equipment actually exists as a prototype or if the video is AI-generated. [Image courtesy of Midjourney]
Those 40 Butterfly ultrasound chips (one chip has 8,960 transducers, and each transducer is just 200 microns wide) will be arranged in a ring around the patient, Midjourney says in a video depicting the technology. Those chips will fire at up to 1,000 times per second to image slices of the human body which are then used to make a 3D map.
DeVivo cited his healthcare experience of more than three decades in saying “it’s clear to me that our U.S. healthcare system is still primarily designed to treat illness, not prevent it.
“The future of health starts with awareness: understanding your body earlier and tracking how it responds to factors like diet, exercise, and behavior,” he continued. “Midjourney has unveiled an extraordinary whole-body scanner — no radiation, no magnetic risk, low cost, and accessible — with about half a million sensors scanning simultaneously and over two petaflops of processing power. Designed for weekly use, this is the next generation of AI on device. A continuous window into your health… because the earlier you can see what’s changing, the sooner you can do something about it.”
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