GoKawiilLast week, Midjourney, an AI startup best known for its image generator, made an unusual pivot: medical imaging.
The company announced a futuristic ultrasound scanner that would dunk users into a vat of water and, hopefully, produce “something as powerful as MRI” yet “as casual as a trip to the spa.” Midjourney says the goal is to help people live longer, better, and healthier lives. CEO David Holz has suggested the system could one day be better than MRI. Experts are skeptical. While several medical imaging specialists told The Verge they were not dismissive of the idea outright, they said Midjourney has shown little public evidence to substantiate its goals —especially for a technology that has been around for decades and has well-understood limits.
To call this a left-field move is an understatement. Midjourney is shifting from generating synthetic images online into the high-stakes, tightly regulated world of medicine — and definitely not-so-tightly regulated realm of wellness. It is not immediately clear how the venture relates to Midjourney’s existing AI business model, and AI is hardly mentioned in the blog post laying out the company’s plan. Midjourney’s head of medical Tom Calloway told The Verge the scanner uses AI and specialized chips to handle the “unthinkably huge amounts of data and processing power” required to “execute a scan.” Calloway said that AI is also used “to enable lossless compression and dramatically speed up processing.”
There is still “a long road ahead to generating high-quality images and then to understand the clinical value and demonstrate net benefit to patients.”
Radiologists, clinicians, and imaging experts who spoke to The Verge were less awestruck. Several said the concept is genuinely exciting and maybe even plausible. But they also said the idea is not as novel as Midjourney suggests, raised basic questions about its execution, and all asked the same crucial question of the company: Where is the proof?
That question looms over every part of Midjourney’s vision: its comparisons to MRI, the number of scans they say they can perform, the design of its scanner, the fidelity of its images, and the hope that frequent imaging could save and prolong lives.
The machine at the center of “Midjourney Medical” is an ultrasound scanner that would lower users into a vat of water while they stand on a platform. Once submerged, a ring of underwater sensors and scanners would send sound waves into the body and capture the echoes that bounce back to generate internal images. The company likens the process to dolphin echolocation and says the goal is for it “to take no more than 60 seconds.” Typical ultrasounds can take around 30 minutes or more to perform, though length depends on the nature of the test and body part being scanned. MRI scans — which use powerful magnets and radiowaves to generate detailed images of the body’s internal structures — often take longer and can be uncomfortable, requiring patients to lie still inside a narrow, noisy tube. Other ways of generating detailed internal images, such as CT scans, often use ionizing radiation, which makes unnecessary or repeated scans a safety concern.
Midjourney says the scanner is meant to give people more data about their bodies to help them make better decisions about their health. It compares the process and images to MRI scans and even quotes statistics claiming that “the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs” if only there were enough early imaging.
But despite that medical-sounding language, Midjourney is not initially framing the scanner as a diagnostic medical device, citing the high FDA clearance and clinical trials required to market the scanner for medical use. (Though Midjourney says it plans to expand into medical applications later.) The company describes it instead as a way to give people more information about their bodies and plans to embed the machines in spas, where scans will become “a side-effect” of visits. Concept images show luxurious golden rooms and pools of water, about as far from a doctor’s office as imaginable.
Image: Midjourney
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