Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans
The AI image generator says this side project will be ‘in many ways superior to even MRI machines.’
by Richard Lawler
Jun 17, 2026, 11:12 PM EDT
“A scan of an imaging phantom, segmented to validate how cleanly structures separate under controlled conditions.“ Image: Midjourney Medical
Richard Lawler is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.
Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the “cat pictures” produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it’s an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone, and organs to start. Holz said ideally, you could do this once a year or every single day, as it “aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways.”
He mentioned that one way he’d like to use it would be to see how his body changes in response to diet and workout changes, saying, “I’m not the most measured man on Earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily measurable information.” A set of job listings advertises the company’s goal as trying to “build and launch the world’s first full-body ultrasound CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.”
Midjourney Medical
The Midjourney Scanner was developed in a partnership with ultrasound tech company Butterfly Network, which said it uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip™ imaging modules per system.”
This is Midjourney’s AI segmentation overlay of a black-and-white ultrasound scan. Image: Midjourney Medical
The scanning process starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves and then record the ripples from them passing through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images, saying the scan will take about 60 seconds.
