AI lab Midjourney investing over $74M to launch whole-body ultrasound screening business

A San Francisco-based research lab is investing $74 million as it seeks to launch a new whole-body ultrasound scanning business. Radiologists, meanwhile, took to social media Thursday to criticize the endeavor.  

Midjourney Inc.—a popular generative AI firm focused on image creation—previously inked the eight-figure deal with ultrasound manufacturer Butterfly Network back in November. On June 18, it officially announced the launch of Midjourney Medical, with the first clinic slated for the Bay Area. 

The company claims it will offer a “totally new form of medical imaging” it calls “ultrasonic CT,” hoping to deploy 50,000 of these scanners around the world over the next six years. 

“Ultrasonic CT lets us aim for whole-body imaging that's in many ways superior to even MRI machines, but the scan takes as little as 60 seconds,” Midjourney Medical said in an announcement June 18. “There is no radiation, no powerful magnetic fields—just sound and water and 60 seconds.”

Midjourney claims it will use its fleet of ultrasound sensors to perform “a billion full-body scans every month.” The first flagship Midjourney Spa is slated to open at the end of 2027 and will include hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and “cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body.” Midjourney said it will deploy 10 scanners at the spa with the “capability to do more body scans a year than all MRI scanners on earth combined.” 

Burlington, Massachusetts-based Butterfly Network also touted the announcement, seeing its stock price leap 33% on news of the new business. The publicly traded ultrasound-maker said the scanner prototype incorporates 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system, licensed under a co-development agreement with Midjourney. Future generations of the scanner are “expected to utilize substantially more imaging modules, reflecting the platform’s planned evolution and scalability.” 

Butterfly said the two previously disclosed the up to $74 million agreement, which will be spread over a five-year term, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the terms, Midjourney will pay a one-time fee of $15 million and a $10 million annual licensing fee to Butterfly. It also will make additional payments of up to $9 million tied to certain milestones. 

“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,” Joseph DeVivo, president and CEO of Butterfly Network, said in a statement June 18. “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.”

Midjourney shared a futuristic concept video of what its spa might look like. It depicts a woman disrobing, stepping onto a circular platform and descending into a pool of water to undergo imaging. 

“Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation,” the company said in a blog post. “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.”

Midjourney—which was founded by David Holz and gained popularity for its text-to-image AI prompts—said the scans will create 3D maps of the body. Over the next 12 months, it will work on “refining our algorithms and hardware,” conducting research trials to “show off the raw capabilities of our system.” It’s also submitting test results to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for “increased capabilities.” 

“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,” it said in the blog post. 

Radiologists raise questions

Radiologists expressed skepticism about the business and its claims on Thursday. Francis Deng, MD, a Baltimore-based neuroradiologist, noted that Midjourney previously generated an anatomically incorrect image of a rat’s anatomy, which was published and later retracted from Frontiers. Now it wants to start a company generating images of a person’s insides. 

“The project has a technical basis but the device will be limited by the fundamental inability of ultrasound to penetrate through bone, air, and deep soft tissues, rendering many body parts inaccessible,” Deng, an assistant professor with Hopkins Medicine, wrote on social media. “Device development is expensive and they don’t have investors. Very surprising pivot,” he added, a reference to Midjourney’s business model of shunning institutional investors, positioning itself as a “community-backed research lab.” 

Gennaro D'Anna, MD, a neuroradiologist in Italy, said the concept seems intriguing and the accompanying video is “cool.” However, “in medicine, we are impressed by evidence, rather than shining images.” 

“Perhaps the supporting data already exist and will be released soon. If so, I will be genuinely interested to read them,” wrote D’Anna, with CDI Centro Diagnostico Italiano, a prominent private healthcare network based in Milan. “Until then, I find it increasingly concerning that potentially revolutionary medical technologies are introduced through cinematic AI-generated marketing videos rather than through rigorous scientific evidence.”

Breast radiologist Laura Heacock, MD, also questioned Midjourney’s early marketing claims. She pushed back against assertions that “nobody’s ever done this before,” noting that ultrasound tomographic systems already are commercially available for breast imaging. Heacock echoed Deng’s concerns about the limitations of ultrasound while emphasizing magnetic resonance imaging’s superiority. 

“The question remains: Why would I use an experimental full body US when there's whole body MRI available that's already diagnostic quality?” wrote Heacock, who is an associate professor with NYU Langone Health, in New York. “Do I think this is new and exciting? Yes, absolutely,” she added later. “It looks like it's going to be great for body composition, and I do think there will be some improvement in the future. Fresh takes on imaging are great. Is it currently medical-grade diagnostic quality? No, not based on what they showed us. What's been presented so far does not outperform modern US, CT or MRI.”