USCT scanner (ultrasonic computed tomography) · serves as: Medical imaging, Sensing.
Which group Midjourney Scanner belongs to and how it is built
This subcategory includes complete imaging devices used for medical diagnostics and wellness: full-body ultrasonic computed tomography (USCT) scanners, computed tomography (CT) scanners, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, and hybrid systems. Individual ultrasound probes and standalone imaging sensor modules belong to separate subcategories.
A component type denoting an imaging device that uses ultrasonic computed tomography (USCT). The device surrounds the patient's body with a ring of ultrasound transducers that act both as speakers and microphones. Each transducer emits sound waves and listens for how they bounce, scatter, and travel through different tissues. From the timing and intensity of the returning signals, a reconstruction algorithm computes what sits at each point inside a body slice — at sub-millimetre resolution, without ionizing radiation (unlike CT) and without a magnetic field (unlike MRI).
Basic physical properties of Midjourney Scanner — dimensions, weight and materials
Midjourney Scanner is the first hardware product from the new Midjourney Medical division, announced on June 18, 2026. The device scans the entire body using ultrasonic computed tomography (USCT). A patient steps onto a moving platform that descends into a pool of water at roughly 5 cm/s, and as the body descends it passes through a ring of about half a million sand-grain-sized elements — each acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone, emitting and recording ultrasound waves. The scanner uses no ionizing radiation and no magnetic fields.
According to Midjourney's official description, the ring is built from roughly half a million transducer squares. The initial prototype configuration uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip™ imaging modules per system (Butterfly Network press release). Independent industry sources report 8,960 transducers per chip, about 358,000 elements total, and a 70 cm ring diameter — these figures come from the prototype demo and are not published in the manufacturer's technical specification. Data throughput from the ring is estimated at terabytes per second: each second of scan data corresponds to about 500 hours of raw HD video.
The current prototype completes a full scan in about 20 minutes. The bottleneck is data-transfer speed between the transducers and the external reconstruction cluster (the system delivers roughly 2 petaflops of compute — confirmed by Butterfly Network and Tech Times). Midjourney's stated target is no more than 60 seconds. Reconstruction produces sub-millimetre resolution. The algorithm rebuilds 3D maps of the body interior by analysing how sound waves change shape as they pass through different tissues (water, skin, fat, muscle, bone). The prototype does not yet use AI in its imaging pipeline.
The scanner is built on Butterfly's Ultrasound-on-Chip™ semiconductor platform, licensed under a co-development agreement signed in November 2025 (Form 8-K) and the Butterfly Embedded™ program (formerly Octiv). The contract is valued at up to USD 74 million in payments over a five-year term. Hardware lead at Midjourney is Ahmad Abbas, previously an Apple Vision Pro engineer. Midjourney is a company with no outside investors and funds the project from its own resources.
The device does not yet hold FDA clearance for diagnostic use. Midjourney has begun discussions with the FDA and intends to pursue body composition measurement (muscle, fat, bone, organ volumes) as its first regulatory path, rather than full clinical diagnostics. From a safety standpoint, the scanner uses only ultrasound waves — the same broad mechanism as routine prenatal ultrasound — with no ionizing radiation and no magnetic fields.
Next 12 months: refinement of algorithms and hardware, research trials, second-generation hardware design, and build-out of a first research spa in San Francisco. End of 2027: opening of the public Midjourney Spa near Union Square in San Francisco (approx. 25,000 sq ft across four floors, around 10 scanners, hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, gym). 2028: third-generation scanner with fully custom silicon. Long-term ambition for 2031: a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide and one billion scans per month.
