Can an underwater body scanner replace traditional MRI machines?
Midjourney is developing a body scanner that dips users in a shallow pool, detects their health issues in less than a minute, and generates a detailed image of their muscles, nerves, veins, and more.
Midjourney, the generative AI company, is building a body scanner that can assess a user’s health by submerging them in water. In less than 60 seconds, the medical machine should produce a detailed 3D map of their body, including their tissues, arteries, muscles, and nerves. It would allow them to identify (potential) medical issues in advance so they can address them before they progress. It’s a lot like an MRI, but “as cheaply as possible” and without needing to schedule appointments, the company claims.
The Midjourney scanner has a circular platform where the user stands, and it slowly descends them into a shallow pool. The body passes through a large ring, which contains half a million tiny sensor squares that create ultrasonic waves. These record and produce terabytes of the user’s body data per second, which is then used to generate the medical image.
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Midjourney’s body scanner has no magnets or radio waves
It’s an ambitious project deriving from Midjourney‘s new research lab branch. The company says that over the next 12 months, it plans to refine its algorithms and hardware every day, as well as conduct research trials, so that by 2031 it can release a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide, “enough to give regular monthly scans to a billion people.”
It’s a utopian use of data and contemporary technology that suggests an alternative to, or even a replacement for, traditional MRI scanning machines. Midjourney’s body scanner doesn’t use any magnets or radio waves, and it doesn’t require 30 to 90 minutes of lying still inside a machine within a dedicated room where metal objects near the user’s body could be vacuumed toward it. The company believes that submerging users in water in less than a minute and using a ring filled with sensors to read their body is enough to identify what’s wrong with their health and how it currently is.
Sound waves may not read all body parts, unlike MRI machines
Previous studies have found that sound waves may not travel easily through bone or air, meaning they might not be able to penetrate some parts of the body and see what’s happening within it because of the acoustic impedance mismatch.
Other research has shown that sound energy is blocked by half every 2 millimeters in bone and every 0.6 millimeters in air. In this case, when the sound waves of Midjourney’s body scanner try to read the user’s ribs and spine, these parts “block” the sound, preventing it from fully monitoring their condition. The lungs and adult brain present the same challenges because the former is filled with air, while the latter is enclosed in thick skull bone. Both can hinder sound waves from passing through.
Reading blockages are one concern; there’s also the early stage of the AI and algorithms used to run the system. AI models have been known to “predict” missing gaps in images, and this can happen when the machines can’t get through the blockages during the reading. It can cause what researchers call AI hallucination, where the model produces images based on its own predictions rather than the body’s actual state.
Midjourney plans to open a spa with a body scanner
It’s hard to overlook these possible risks, especially when the user’s health is at stake and given that a purpose of a medical body scanner is to diagnose diseases and plan treatments. In its announcement, the team behind Midjourney’s body scanner says it will train and refine the machine’s algorithms on a daily basis, but has not yet shared where it plans to publish the data, or at least the updates and summaries of its findings.
A health body scanner with a shallow pool is certainly a fresh take on a medical imaging device, especially from a company known as an AI image generator, but it still needs to undergo feasibility studies and trials to determine whether it can be as reliable as traditional medical devices when it comes to tracking and detecting health issues. And that’s only relevant if this is part of the research lab’s goal, since they say that “whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.”
In other news, Midjourney plans to open a spa with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms that will house the body scanner. The team plans to open the first location in San Francisco in 2027 to gather “real world knowledge of what this infrastructure is going to be like,” which may include data from users trying out the machine. The following year, the company aims to launch the third generation of the body scanner, with image quality and scan time described as “night and day” compared to the current version.
