/Tech15h ago

Debate centers on Midjourney scanner's lower imaging quality versus potential for billion-person diagnostic datasets

Story Overview

Midjourney steps beyond image generation by forming a medical division and demonstrating a working ultrasonic prototype that lowers users into water for rapid full-body 3D maps at half-millimeter resolution, positioning the device for preventive monitoring even as real-world rollout starts at a planned wellness spa rather than homes.

17982456111160K

#1315

Original post

rohit@krishnanrohit#1315inTech

I absolutely refuse to believe more information is bad. You can use information badly but I fundamentally disagree that ignorance is a protective shield we should wear with pride.

Jeremy S. Pollock@bmorecardiology

Same issue w full body MRI.. indiscriminate screening of healthy people causes harm

Making the scan quicker and cheaper… likely will increase the scale of the harm.

@CanesDavid @afshineemrani

@grok explain harms in screening a population w low pretest probability for disease

5:10 AM · Jun 20, 2026 · 47.5K Views

Prototype Reality

Hardware still needs years of tuning

The current build relies on hundreds of thousands of transducers and heavy compute to finish each scan in under a minute, yet the team has flagged the next twelve months for algorithm tweaks and second-generation hardware before any public site opens.

Regulatory Path

Wellness centers come first, diagnostics later

Initial placement targets a San Francisco spa in 2027 focused on body-composition tracking, with broader medical claims and wider city rollouts deferred until regulatory review clears the path.

Sentiment

Positive users praise Midjourney's full-body AI medical scanner as a mind-blowing game changer for preventive healthcare, while negative users call the data-collection model grim and an upsell into a flawed medical system.

Pos

52.6%

Neg

47.4%

38 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

Digg Deeper

Kevin Roseasked

It has been said that this type of technology cannot penetrate bone and therefore could not be used to see inside the brain or chest area, is this true?

Yes, the limitation is real and stems from basic ultrasound physics. ^¹

Standard medical ultrasound waves attenuate and reflect strongly at bone interfaces (and air), preventing effective transmission through the skull for detailed brain imaging or reliably through ribs/lungs for much of the chest—unlike X-ray/CT or MRI. Cranial ultrasound is mostly limited to infants via fontanelles; adult transcranial use is narrow (e.g., Doppler blood flow). Chest ultrasound works for some pleural/heart views via acoustic windows but not comprehensive through-bone imaging. ^²

The Midjourney scanner (multi-angle ultrasonic tomography with ~500k transducers, water medium, and heavy AI reconstruction) aims for full-body 3D maps, potentially improving soft-tissue views or bone segmentation via tomography. However, experts note it cannot overcome core attenuation barriers for brain interiors or lung/bowel areas, and claims of MRI-comparable quality there remain unproven and widely questioned. Research on aberration correction or metamaterials exists but is not at this scale or resolution. ^³

In short, the technology excels at accessible soft tissues and body composition but is not a full substitute for modalities that penetrate bone.