Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:

- This looks really cool and I hope they keep innovating on this. I love seeing new modalities develop and despite my (many) reservations and criticisms, if even one good use case comes out of it that truly helps people, it's tech money well spent imo.

- They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true "full body" in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that's why we use CT for lung screening!)

- The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite - small, deep structures.

- "Incidentalomas" or unexpected, probably benign, findings are annoying to physicians, but I in general have no problem with people collecting data on themselves where they can. To me it's similar to heart rate monitors or home blood pressure cuffs. The main issue here is education, so that patients know what the data is and is not telling them. The more complex the data, the more difficult that is.

- Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that "it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs", I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.

> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body.

I have a mixed response:

1. It kind of makes sense that an AI imagery company would apply that to other novel applications of imagery and computing and try to do something cool with it.

2. Midjourney as a brand is all over the place and this feels -off, somehow. I think from a branding pov they should have just started a different company with a different name. Perhaps a single image-focused umbrella company named [Name] with Midjourney and this medtech company as separate subsidiaries.

3. AI imagery companies suddenly making medtech products and spas feels very “we don’t know what to do, so we’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be bad, just that it’s not typically what you’d do if you’re working on something super successful already.

4. AFAIK they are entirely self-funded and so this really isn’t about VC scaling or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re immune to the same cultural pressures.

I find the technology side intriguing and worth a deeper dive.

But I'm not convinced about their view of having people casually going to a spa every week and getting a full body scan. AFAIK, some doctors tend to avoid full-body scans. The reason is that each body is different and has its own quirks. If you do a scan for no reason other than "I can do it fast", chances are that the scan will show something unusual. But, at the same time, it is likely that it isn't a problem. And now, you will be stressed about the chance of having some health condition and spend time and money digging into a rabbit hole of what the issue could be, only to find out it was nothing.

They also don't say anything about the price of such a machine. If they really envision a future where everyone can easily get a scan, this is a crucial factor.

This is really interesting! And perhaps surprisingly doesn't trigger any immediate major technical red flags (as someone who has worked with MRI and phased array beamforming), as many HN HW articles do.

My only criticism from the tech video would be that they spend some time lauding the nanometer deflection sensitivity, which might lead some to believe that's indicative of the image resolution. It's not, and it's somewhat of a distraction -- that's just giving us amplitude information, which is comparatively less important than correlated time/phase across the 100k sensors. They do later on state ~mm resolution, which is still great!

Doppler and motion blur may be an issue (e.g. heart beating), as one slice requires a full ring of sequential exposures. But still way faster than MRI, so probably fine.

On a lighter note, it could seriously change the meaning of get FUCT (Full body Ultrasound Computational Tomography)!

> Beyond that, regulation is the next limit. Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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.

This is just not how the FDA works. At all. You can't just email them slideware and marketing materials to keep them in the loop.

You have to hire an army of expensive compliance people (cheap ones aren't nimble enough for startups), develop the whole thing start to finish under strict design controls, and usually throw a lot of time and capital into convincing regulators your very innovative and disruptive new R&D endeavor is actually derivative enough to draft behind some existing medical device.

> ... It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. > ... Together they act as both a choir and an audience

I think I'm not the target audience. I guess they are going to need to sign up a lot of people, to train on their scans + their medical outcomes. So the article is talking to people who will get enthused by it, which is more difficult after the question of 23AndMe data sale.

So, on the one hand, this is interesting! Reducing radiation from CT scans is a noble cause on its own. If on top of that it could make tomography cheaper and easier, you could imagine getting earlier detection of aneurisms, fibrosis, cirrhosis, thrombosis, stenosis, even plausibly cancerous masses (along with plenty of over-detection).

On the other hand, nothing here substantiates this promise. We've got a video render of what a hypothetical device could look like. It's probably more than nothing (they got exclusive license on these butterfly chips in 2025, and it's at least plausible that the best solution to the data bottleneck in an absurdly noisy system like this is real-time AI image processing)... But it's certainly less than something. It's a hype video that doesn't prove feasibility of anything, yet.

EDIT: This is all in reaction to the second video on the announcement post[0], which is much more informative than anything on the page currently linked.

[0]https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

Almost nobody here is a doctor, and it shows...over diagnosis, over treatment, those are all terms that doctors learn about in medical school.

Image segmentation is a real problem, and achieving better precision is a good goal. The "golden" standard these days is likely https://github.com/wasserth/totalsegmentator, if someone can make it even more accurate, that would be very very good. But yet again, there are infinite amounts of variations in human bodies, which means even the best models focus only on segmenting known organs, and leave anything unknown alone.

This is ridiculously optimistic. The technology, USCT with full waveform inversion, is not new.

It’s already used in breast imaging (SoftVue) and hasn’t replace mammography. A body part ideally suited for ultrasound.

More compute many minimize some of the fundamental limits of sound waves (bone and gas) but I would be shocked if they have useful images of 90% of the body parts we image with CT or MRI and even beyond that I question how much it’s more useful than B-mode anyway.

Quite slow which means most things abdomen and chest will be motion degraded.

This may be useful in superficial areas but then why do whole body anyway. Might be some new niches and interesting research but hardly revolutionary in my opinion.

> enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.

There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to get cheap full body scans. I like being able to see inside of myself. I can think of a lot of situations where the low-fidelity images coming out of this (they're not good compared to real medical imaging, if you've ever looking at MRI/CT up close) could be useful for coarse analysis of certain conditions that come and go or need to be monitored over long periods of time.

What I don't like is the idea of getting people to do full body scans every month just to be safe. This might sound like a good idea if you haven't looked at the literature on preventative full body imaging. Looking for bad things inside the body sounds like a great idea on the surface.

The problem is that imaging, especially when it's as rough as these ultrasounds, and possibly worse when augmented by AI guessing at what it's seeing, can lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures. The net effect can even become more harmful than the number of real problems it catches. There's a long history of research on this as many companies have tried to commercialize full-body scanning in the past. It frequently leads to situations where there's an unknown or ambiguous spot on the imaging that the person reading the scan can't rule out, which turns into a lot of anxiety and eventually more imaging, biopsies, or unnecessary surgeries. It's easy to think "better safe than sorry" until you realize how often these benign but ambiguous findings show up on full body imaging.

So my initial thoughts on this are that it would be good to make cheap ultrasonic imaging accessible as an as-needed service to use for specific conditions. I do not think it's a good idea to go down the road of trying to scan the entire population once a month and then run it through AI to see if anything pops up. The number of false positives would be overwhelming and lead to a lot of unnecessary procedures to calm the resulting anxieties.

I think a lot of medical diagnosis could be solved with mass data collection if it was cheap enough. Right now, blood draws are somewhat routinely done because they provide a lot of human-interpretable indicators from a small number of values, and there is some evidence that e.g. "dogs can smell cancer" etc. (i.e. some diseases cause detectable odors).

With a big enough data set of [all kinds of bio values, including ones considered irrelevant for that disease] labeled with diagnoses, I suspect we could get very fast and accurate automatic diagnoses, even from a limited data set currently considered uncorrelated. Rather than going to your primary care physician, you'd go into the standardized, mass-produced and thus reasonably cheap everything-scanner, and you could likely get a more accurate diagnosis (or at least "things to check") than the average doctor would be able to give you under the practical constraints they typically operate under (time, available information/diagnostics).

This goes in that direction, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I could imagine that given enough training data, ML models will be able to pick up on minute details that make it possible to diagnose diseases that weren't historically considered ultrasound-diagnoseable from this kind of detailed ultrasound.

I think combining it with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry of e.g. breath or blood/sweat/urine samples would also have the potential to be a cost-effective diagnosis method - lots of data, probably not all too useful for human interpretation, but would open the potential to walk up to a machine, breathe into it, spit into it, pee into it, give it a swab, and have it come up with an accurate diagnosis without invasive testing. If mass produced, the cost of something like this could easily drop below the cost of a typical doctor's visit. (I googled it and it seems like GCMS is already used for some diagnoses, but screening only for a few specific diseases rather than "throw ML at it and try to diagnose everything").

I don't understand how people can hate on this. It's probably the most novel & ambitious consumer health device ever? Plus they're doing it fully bootstrapped. Let them cook!

They've lost the plot, especially with the spa. And a billion scans a month is absurd.

Is this some AI hallucination post?

I had to check the date after seeing the headline, and again after opening the page. Thought it was April Fools.

Regardless, as a doctor and full stack engineer, I'm looking forward to learning more about their methodologies, their approaches, but I don't think this is going to be displacing MRIs or remotely close, based off the cursory initial glance. If their vision is to be able to provide end users with more actionable data with some kind of "low fidelity" medical imaging data that is somewhere above zero and or standard imaging and high fidelity modalities like CT/MRI, then this could be somewhat interesting.

Not a radiologist and not medical advice. Just my two cents.

Gives me the strange impression of a product that was vibe-brainstormed, vibe-engineered, and vibe-announced.

This is an ambitious idea, but it’s pretty misleading to lump MRI, CT, and ultrasound into a single “body scan” category. They do different things and explicitly do not serve as replacements for each other.

Inventing new, affordable early detection devices is incredible, but being so misleading in their positioning is going to kill long-term trust in this and other new scanning tech.

There are 100M pregnant women right now. If it works for just for the vanity use of seeing your baby grow (forget the medical imaging aspect) and can be as casual and relaxing experience as they put forward, then I can see such a spa being wildly successful.

First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute

Neko Health has been doing this now for a few years. What I heard is that ultimately it doesn’t solve much (other than them privately collecting all your data) because there are lot of false positives and these false positives are deferred to the general healthcare system, which is a major bottleneck.

FWIW, I tried the prototype. It's very real. I scanned my hand and arm. It showed realtime images of slices of my hand as I dipped my hand in the water. Really amazing IMO. I think this will be a game changer when it comes out. It's just so easy to scan yourself.

radiologist here - example images don't look great

It's obvious why they're doing this: there's a lot of money in healthcare.

What there isn't is good evidence that these full body scans actually improve outcomes.

> You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

In the early years of X-rays, doctors found all sorts of patients with major organ displacement, and performed surgery to, for example, hold the liver or kidneys “up”.

It took a while to realise that textbooks since Leonardos time had drawn and based anatomy on (dead) patients lying on a slab. But X-rays were taken with (alive) patients standing up. So of course there was a lot of “your kidney has slipped!”

I fully support and applaud this kind of medical innovation (even if … why midjourney?) but we need to be careful of the medical term VOMIT (victim of modern imaging technology). At some point we need a human doctor to say “calm down, live your life, eat right, exercise right, and accept that somethings don’t need to be panicked over yet - come back in six months”

I think it's a bit odd to compare this to an MRI. The physics are totally different and there are things it fundamentally won't image in the same way because it's basically just ultrasound.

The approach sounds like something which appears in a few research articles from the 2010s (ultrasound computed tomography), although submersion to make the ultrasound transmission more efficient seems novel.

It's possible the "spa" approach is used because it's hard to achieve the level of cleanliness required in a typical health facility using a shared bath.

>"Like an MRI but at 100 times the speed."

Is speed the limiting factor of an MRI? Do we need faster MRIs? It doesn't seem like there's a backlog of folks waiting for a continuously running MRI machine. How does the imaging compare to an MRI? How about the cost? I think it's a really fascinating project but I don't understand what problems it solves.

Companies are awfully confident of advertising "revolutionary" ideas that don't even have a testable prototype. I too have a dream of world peace and eternal human prosperity that I would like to sell. Any interested investors?

A problem with large scale "screening" is the explosion of false positives (even at very high specificity) and the follow-ups that those generate will overwhelm our current healthcare systems.

So any machine that does something medical must address this. Either that, or don't be medical. But then you might just as well tell people: "Move around a bit more. Talk to other people. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants."

But we are always attracted to solutions that fix us in easy ways. The problem is that the issues are often with our behaviours, and those are hard to change. Or perhaps we are finding easy ways now with GLP-1 agonists and our future health and happiness is in drugs... But then why do we need this machine...

Super cool. Reminds me of Mary Lou Jepsen's (who did One Laptop Per Child) company Openwater, which is using some kinda infrared holography, also as an alternative to MRIs.

Supposedly they can be made lightweight and wearable.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen#Openwater

I have thought that extremely accessible, portable, non-radiation imaging would be revolutionary. Imagine every doctor - or even every person - had a handheld thing they could wave over your affected area to get a high res 3d image of the issue. Of course we have mri, xray, and ultrasound, but those are big and expensive. Obviously there are engineering reasons that is the case, but It seems like a concerted effort to make imaging more portable and accessible, coupled with ai to help analyze could bring about all sorts of follow-on health improvements. Your regular practitioner could check you for heart blockages, clots that lead to stroke, cancers etc as a matter of course. I’m not sure stepping into a golden vat of water is what I have in mind but medical imaging does seem like a possible area for drastic innovation.

https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067422898407837797?s=20

one nice thing may be way to enhance penetrative ultrasound eg smaller immersive ultrasound tomography in smaller dip tank hey stick your leg in this thinner immersive tunnel , e.g., extremity up-close immersion or trunk wrappers vs just wand-based?

Not sure why people keep posting links to X videos when they are available from at the official announcement post: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

World's first trillionaire doesn't need more money or influence in destroying people lives, let's do a small step at a time and not use X.

I watched the whole video thinking it was generated by Midjourney, the product, and that the announcement was related to fidelity in images/video around human anatomy. This seems like a very strange pivot for them indeed.

April fools 2027 is gonna be nuts

We live in an era where the daily news stories are so crazy topping them is going to take some creativity

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and interpreting it in a charitable way because they sound earnest about it, this is incredibly ambitious and cool-sounding, and I wish them all the best. It's something that's some sort of pipe dream, a noninvasive diagnosis machine that is able to use certain generic measurements and then derive insane levels of data from it. We've of course seen Theranos, but the holy grail remains.

Of course, there's always the tradeoff between research data collection and access vs user privacy, and striking that balance is incredibly hard. To make anything like this even remotely feasible you'll need a shitton of data and have it fully available to your researchers as well, while somehow safeguarding individual users. anonymizing medical data is impossible without rendering it near useless. Hoping they can figure that out! (Also, with human bodies being so different from one another, combatting bias is probably an eternal challenge)

Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.

Interesting choice to draw "inspiration" from the chambers of Niander Wallace, the main antagonist in Blade Runner 2049.

https://architectureofsilence.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/archi...

I watched the video first without reading the text and thought, wow, Midjourney has gotten really good, they generated debris in the water exactly like what would happen in real life if the water is reused enough.

Then I started reading the text, and realize it's not an ad for their video generating tool? Cool if each of it can do ~120000 scans per-month. But if I have to step in to a tank filled with debris and discharges from ~3,999 other people (assuming the machine is maintained daily), I think I might have to wear protection and you must not lower me beyond my mouth.

But, if the claim is real, then yea, it could really help. So many health problems can be discovered early with ultrasound scan, only if it can be made easy, cheap and fast. Not sure about resolution and other specs, if it can be as good as CT, then more lives can be saved.

I won't have an opinion until Brian Johnson tells me how much younger this makes him.

Looks like an array of ultrasound probes which is fine.. how does this deal with bone obstructing windows? the example with an abdo is feasible and fine but you cant do that with brain or easily with heart /lungs

I'm sorry, a billion full-body scans a month?

For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.

What possible use could there be for doing this?

I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.

> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

Signal versus Noise ratio cried in her grave.

I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.

Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.

Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.

I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.

I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.

I don't really understand the connection; they went from image generation to medical scanning?

This is a full body ultrasound?

Medical I don't care about futuristic sounding stuff. Just show me evidence based and clinically useful testing.

Use AI and new scans to help sure but prove it works otherwise this could be another dead end.

This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!

slide 28

https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...

I had to check whether this was some kind of an april fool joke.

It looks like a legit attempt. Wow. This is insanely innovative.

How much is a scan going to cost? The video motions petabyte per scan? These types are scans (medical images) are extremely dense and large in size, storing short or long term images sounds like its going to be extremely expensive when combined with AI analysis, etc. Not to Mention the cost of operating a Spa is not cheap, especially if your buying real estate, and the cost of the machine itself.

Is this a dystopian Spa, where full scans cost 50k, and basic ones are 1-5k?

So it's what, computational ultrasound? Why are they making it sound so much like they're going to steal my kidneys?

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.

If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.

Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.

(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)

Massive Theranos vibes.

You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.

The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.

After reading this first, it looked almost like a joke, like how Google used to do Google- TISP Toilet Internet Service Provider https://archive.google/tisp/install.html

Even now without Xrays it is very hard to really even see if there are blocks in your artery usuing ultrasound (Echocardiography alone). Ultrasound is used indirectly by measuring blood flow difference between stress and rest - not a spa session anyway. Looks like a prank really

Imaging is not preventive care. Exercise is. Good food without chemicals is. Good sleep is.unfortunately these important parts cannot easily be monetized to provide stock options to the insiders/

I can only applaud. Regardless of whether this device is possible, or economically viable, this is a brave move and a bold vision. Taking bigger risks is what what makes the advances possible.

At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.

Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.

Elysium is playing out right before our eyes

they call it Promethean Spas... Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver.

I thought this was a satire at first

Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.

Awesome work. The second video is great. I don’t know enough about medical science to consider viability and shortcomings, but I’m impressed by the dream. Keep cooking.

And even if the device fails, I’m sure the spa will be nice.

Impressive vision. Excited to see how 'Ultrasonic CT' handles real-world clinical validation challenges.

Genuine question.

Outside of providing access to their core AI products at a free or discounted rate, what philanthropic initiatives are OpenAI and Anthropic pursuing to improve the lives of people in developing countries?. I can't recall seeing anything on their blog recently about it. Happy to be corrected.

Wonderful stuff, good job Midjourney.

An AI can be trained on body scans to detect diseases, tumours etc. Ideally this can be trained on real scans with real diseases but you could also train on synthetic data (synthetic bodies and/or synthetic diseases).

You can also focus ultrasonic waves to destroy (vaporise or cook) diseased tissue.

Anyone know the song that's playing in the demo?

So if it works: Awesome.

The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?

There is no way I am letting an AI image generator take scans of my naked body

That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.

This is pretty, but it's goals make it sound under-thought and somewhat silly. Typical "SF is coming to save the world" stuff.

> 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.

> What This Leads To

> 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.

There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.

There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.

What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.

I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.

"when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging

> Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.

Why is that almost every LLM generated article sounds like a LinkedIn motivational post?

(this is not a rhetorical question, I would really like to know why, from all the writing styles, this is the most prevalent one)

> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.

With "you" being a VC backed startup aiming for the next $1T IPO. What could possibly go wrong?

People on here really need to understand what the incidentalome is.

I think getting more medical data could prevent a lot of health problems, and collecting it in a relaxed and frequent environment could be interesting. This announcement is honestly just... a bit weird. They're talking about wanting to do a billion scans a month, but they haven't even mentioned what the ultrasound data can tell you about your health, nor have they showed a physical demo of the product. I think the latter is the most important part, does it actually work?

> As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.

So how exactly is the scan counter going to hit their target of a billion per month? Are they scanning us while we sleep?

This is one of the creepiest "big AI" product launches I've read. I know it's becoming a meme, but that spa looks like something from a Black Mirror episode.

If they were just creating a new less-invasive and differently informative alternative to fMRI / PET / EEG / CT for researchers and doctors to use in hospitals, where experienced human doctors were given agency in finding out how best to use the tool and interpret the results (understanding all the caveats that go for full body scans, false positive rates and so on[0]), then that would be amazing, a tiny step forward for the human race. But packaged like this, eww.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580255

Will there be a way to use this scanner for people that are unable to stand up because of a disability or medical condition?

They should ask their LLM for fun things to do in prison! Or ask Elizabeth Holmes.

> But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.

Why don’t they approach this as a regular medical product?

With this spa angle I’m worried about hidden motives; perhaps data collection is a major goal. Or maybe this tech is not reliable enough.

Here is the music from the video: https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-an-evening-at-the-lake-f...

This is next level "never let them know your next move" type of play. I hope they win.

Always trump with the savior card when bad PR¹ starts creeping in.

¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332

Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice

This is interesting & ambitious!

Not a physician, I wonder about the general efficacy of random scans vs more boring traditional things like bloodwork. That is: is there more clinical power in doing blood + urine labs monthly or body scans like this?

https://www.medbridgenz.com/post/phased-array-ct-china

Remind me of this, radar based.

I have seen AI projects to convert a tomography into actual 3D models.

Not easily, but not an unexplored field either.

Well that's certainly an interesting pivot, when Midjourney where set to announce hardware, who predicted this?

> Midjourney Spa

Those visuals look straight out of the Backrooms

Hell yeah, my AI image generation company is now running an alternative medicine AI MRI-alternative imagine spa. Hell yeah.

This is surely trolling? "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography" has quite the acronym..

This is like the plot of the movie Elysium

Sounds like programmers woke up from a fever dream and decided they can come up with an idea and flesh out the details later.

This is absolutely a scam. Seems incredibly fishy.

They will do everything but not release the API

Why is everyone so negative about this? Getting a CT or X-ray and then having AI do early screening on cases that doctors can pass along doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.

Thank you very much, Midjourney.

If some of my doctors were software engineers I probably would be dead by now.

Or mid-dead.

I'm sure I read that 30% will be immortal there, but suddenly the blog post changed... :)

Midjourney out there making the pool rooms a reality

This looks like straight from a sci-fi movie. Crazy how fast things are becoming to look like alien tech. Pretty amazing.

AI is about to find out the difference between talking and doing. Exciting!

This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:

a) it is possible to construct such a scanner

b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything

c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful

But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.

Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.

Assuming it all works 50k scanners running nonstop at 60 seconds a scan is 2.1 billion scans a month. Assuming they aren't lying/exaggerating about anything, and assuming there is no downtime/setup/etc. in between. In other words, reeks of massive bullshit.

Part of me is super excited about this.

The other part wonders if this is the next clinkle.

MJ has shipped stuff before though so I’m optimistic.

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

Isn't this how MRIs and stuff already work, they just use waves with much more appropriate wavelengths...?

If this can image a fetus in utero they're already cutting themselves off from India as a market

So... Rampant point of care ultrasound?

Sounds good to me.

Can one buy it anywhere? At what cost? Would be cool for real-time biohacking and immediate feedback.

Why not have 5,6 rings at different levels and do it live in 3D?

I really wasn't expecting a hardware device from midjourney! Incredible!!

Yesssssss, AI overlords put me in your dolphin technology powered human deep fryer.

Are we at peak AI yet?

AI company announces AI thing using AI video mock up

You don't need to build a perfect med spa, you only need to control the patents of the key pieces of a med spa.

This is nothing more thab a prophylactic patent grab to stifle competition and progress in this space for the next decade and/or hoover up patient data behind a paywall where they will gladly lease the weights and bias cure to you own disease back to you in the form of a subscription.

Welcome back theranos

This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it

TL;DR: "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."

Dolphins aside, is this basically a new angle on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound_computer_tomography?

ER Nurse here:

This produces images as good as an MRI- did I get that right? We already have those- they are relatively cheap ($2000 if you paid cash) and have already been scaled.

The only difference seems to be the speed of the test. But how long does it take to be lowered in and out of the water, not to mention the fact that you are soaking wet afterward. An MRI of the brain takes 15 minutes, only requires you to lie flat on a table, and then you can go about your day.

So we already have this technology- ultrasound is well understood, and free to perform, a bedside ultrasound is around $40k.

These are not medical grade images, so I am not certain how they will reduce medical costs by 50%- no FDA clearance means the images cannot be used for medical diagnosis. Meaning if it finds something serious, you will STILL need imaging at the hospital for the finding to be actionable.

Baby boomers are about to hit the healthcare system hard- and none of them will be able to tolerate being dunked underwater. This technology cannot scale to hospitals, the main consumers of medical imaging.

I appreciate the hopeful outlook, but creating a more elaborate and expensive way to have an MRI done seems like a bit of a fools errand, especially when 50% of bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt.

What are the metrics this will report? What information does it provide that is not already available via other existing means? What is the benefit of daily or monthly full body MRIs? What are you monitoring? How will this achieve the goals they claim 'cannot be overstated' but also cannot be enumerated...

Access to better imaging technology is not a barrier to obtaining medical care, there are imaging centers on every corner. MRI and ultrasound technology are already as advanced ad this, utilize the same ultrasonic technology to obtain images, and are already manufactured at scale.

I am really struggling to figure out the problem this is trying to solve

Interesting but many issues which have been listed here are valid. This is my take on the largest of them.

Preventive testing is not always positive. False negatives creates a false sense of security and false positives drives unnecessary medical procedures. For example, what if this instrument sees "something" and a doctor then follows up with a biopsy, x-ray or explorative surgery. These will all have negative side effects. There has even been a debate of if mammography is a net positive. I think it might be but I'm just saying that even such a thing is debatable. The question is not only if the these early tests find anything, its also a question of whether detecting it early changes the prognosis. Maybe its untreatable anyway? Or maybe it would still be treatable if detected later? And then comes the cost of course, is it economical to do these scans on a population level relative to the alternative cost.

Building medical systems is not for the faint of heart. I was part of a startup building a Micro CT system with the long term goal of using it to detect tumors in biopsies live during surgery (1 um resolution for cm-sized samples) without waiting a week for the normal analysis. We also started with non-medical instrument (general research) and we never got to the medical instrument before we ran out of money (we engineers were too bad at sales). But we did study up on the (European) standards quite a bit. They are not crazy in any way. Its simply that you follow good engineering practice BUT it is hard to move from building a non-medical system to medical system after the fact. The standard is a process standard so it basically says "You should have followed this process when you designed your product". And you need be real careful setting your Intended Use and showing that you have Verified and Validated that your system can be used for the intended use. So most likely they need to build one product now (Body Composition Analysis), use that for research and then set up their Quality Management System before they rebuild everything from requirements to risk analysis to test plans to hardware to software. 10 years is probably on the low side for this and quite the cost.

my first reaction: this pivot makes no sense at all to me.

my second reaction: maybe it does? did they hire up an army of physicists to make better diffusion models or something and they actually have people on staff who can do this?

20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.

At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”

3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.

I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.

If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.

Good luck. Had a friend do a startup that was using similar algos to how Google Maps detect roads in satellite imagery to detect cancer in tissues. Actually worked pretty well - ended up dying in the super long FDA approval phase.

The images and description of the launch seem like they are behind where my buddy was 10+ years ago - so I expect a pretty difficult road ahead, between getting to where it's actually medically viable, and then stomaching the FDA process.

I assume this is like Theranos until proven otherwise.

But hey if not, actually cool.

For those who think this is a joke, there's no differnce between this concept and data centers in space concept, that's worth $2T. Both are not yet proven to work yet. At least they're not screwing the pubilc.

Where is the belly button?!

1) what?

Isn’t modern ultrasound already ultrasound CT, just localized?

The math does not math

Will they also sample a single drop of blood? That would be fitting.

Who needs a head anyway?

HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.

i want a full body scan from the friendly discord app.

THERANOJOURNEY Why put a person in A Wallace Corp. water tube thing when you can deduct all that from the drop of blood?

This is pretty exciting. I hope it works.

Upcoming IPO or acquisition by any chance?

This is the most insane thing to happen to medical imaging

To understand Midjourney Medical (MM), think about current major options: - CT/X-ray: harmful if done too much && can't do for pregnant women - MRI: slow, have to stay still, no metal - Ultrasound: really low fidelity

Midjourney Medical is fast, high fidelity, and perfectly safe!

The holy trifecta.

Insane vision. Insane work. Hats off to the team

Is this company public? Can I short them?

They made the opening credits from Westward.

Congrats!

So this is the purpose of building the backroom pools

Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes.

I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators.

It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself.

There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.

It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.

The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.

At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.

Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?

I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though??

Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI.

The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.

This would be really cool if it comes to fruition and works in the way they want it to.

Given the source, I will treat it as nonsense science fiction until it’s built, functional and scientifically tested.

> It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. 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.

...what. You descend into water and it scans your whole body? How do you breathe? How do you come out the other end?

Have they actually invented some type of novel scanning technology, or is this just AI slop gone wild?

I would have expected a lot more focus on privacy from something designed to regularly and casually create detailed 3D images of humans. The word 'privacy' doesn't even appear in the text.

This is very concerning:

> Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. 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.

Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated.

I have questions in general.

Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous.

Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought.

Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.

So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something.

The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?

It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.

Strong theranos vibes

How are people possibly taking this seriously?

> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?

We can already ask this question...

> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?

Again, we can already ask this question

> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".

> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.

Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!

> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.

More AI slop

> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall

we're hitting the hype peak shortly

Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.

> "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"

FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.

Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong

Theranos 2.0?

It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.

I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].

[0] https://sytse.com/cancer/

We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.

There's a certain type of people the Midjourney folks are involved with in SF. They're high on their own supply. See also hacker houses etc

But why? It doesn’t say why?

This is the most "getting high on your own supply" I have ever seen.

What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?

This looks remarkably dystopian.

The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?

I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.

The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.

Need an update from Elon about what he meant when he said "Midjourney is not mid" and what he thinks now https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784

This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.

Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.

What the hell is wrong with companies these days?

> you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body

No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.

They'll get so much money, all the 60 year old billionaires in SF are so desperate not to die.

This shit is immune to parody, it’s the most California thing to ever exist. “We’ll fix your health problems with an AI spa”. A spa. Give me a break.

What the actual fuck

Medical Doctors: scans on healthy patients are not a good idea

Tech bros: hold my beer…

This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!

At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.

spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho

I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.

Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?

Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>

Amazing. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or can’t stand.

Hmmm… such a slow rollout. In this age of AI assisted development I would expect them to move faster. I would be concerned about Chinese tech replicating this and then selling it to competing wellness spas.

I guess some type of software platform would add some competitive distancing?

I get the benefits of regular scans although I also know that they tend to catch a lot of otherwise benign tumors that can cause a lot of stress.

It's interesting to see an AI company need to pivot so hard in order to find revenue. I guess this means there is very little easy money to be made as more and more models get created, shared and downloaded by others.

Great, a hallucinated output that only the super wealthy can afford, only to waste doctors' time with the need to run every test again at huge expense. Can we not leave medicine to the professionals? Creating a ghibli rip-off is not the same as diagnosing cancer.

Just an crazy idea, but if I were an unethical AI company that wanted to make better AI generated images of people's bodies, I might be tempted to offer very cheap full body scans in an unregulated fancy looking pop-up "med spa" where I could just use my AI to generate fake but impressive medical-looking pictures and then tell everyone who came in the results were inconclusive and they should get themselves checked out by an actual doctor in a hospital "just in case".

Maybe I'd even underpay a few people in developing countries with experience reading ultrasounds to check over the images so that if the humans detected anything suspicious I could give my sucker/client something more specific to tell their doctor about. That'd probably get me some good PR on social media as people post about how my fancy spa found their massive tumor or whatever.

Then I'd use their body scans as training data for my image generating AI. The waivers I'd have people sign to use the service would make sure that I wasn't at risk of any thorny legal issues from the use of all those images for training unlike the rampant copyright infringement method I'd been using previously and would also make sure I couldn't be held responsible for anything my scans found or didn't find.

Less cynically, maybe this thing will be nothing at all like that and one day it'll end up being used by real doctors in actual hospitals and save a bunch of lives or something. Who knows.