Preliminary Thoughts On The Midjourney Scanner

Midjourney is an AI image model. If you’ve ever used Nano Banana or asked GPT to draw you a picture, it’s like that, except from a medium-sized startup instead of a tech giant.Earlier today, they announced a pivot to medical scanners. The new MidJourney Scanner, which they describe as “a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies”, will be a tank of water surrounded by a ring of ultrasound scanners. The patient goes into the tank, the scanners emit ultrasound from all angles, and then some fancy AI reconstructs the echoes into a 3D picture of the body. The result is ultrasound tomography: the same sort of rich data as a CT or MRI, but done via ultrasound, with no harmful radiation, in twenty seconds.This is cool, and it’s great to be ambitious, but I think the narrative among the SF AI crowd has escaped its basis in the medical facts, so I want to throw a bit of cold water on it. I’m a psychiatrist, which is about as far as…