Full-body scan in 60 seconds with sound and water: no radiation, no magnetic field

Now for something unexpected: Midjourney Medical. Yes, the company that generates images from natural language prompts and is the subject of multiple lawsuits for copyright infringement. But it was never your typical Silicon Valley company: it claims to be an independent, community-funded and -driven research lab with no investors. Regardless of its controversial past, it is now approaching full-body scans with a super interesting technology, a form of gen AI for creating images but here from ultrasound signal: they call it "ultrasonic CT." The person whose body is being scanned is immersed in water, which, of course, is why you need to build a whole spa around it (300 Grant Ave. in San Francisco's Union Sq). Before we dismiss this foray into full-body medical imaging as a desperate pivot, let's note that pretty much any type of medical imaging or measurement uses proxies: CGMs don't measure blood glucose, blood and urine tests use mostly indirect signals and assays, and MRI uses computational reconstruction (the "C" in CT). So why not use other forms of penetrative signal that gets transformed by the obstacles it finds in its way (i.e., your organs)? Then it becomes a matter of calibrating and validating inferences for reconstructing images from the output -and generating images is something Midjourney is, arguably (but not universally accepted), good at. I assume this will launch as a general wellness device (consistent with the spa) and not a medical device. I, for one, can't wait to see this project succeed: "Ultrasonic CT lets us aim for whole-body imaging that's in many ways superior to even MRI machines, but the scan takes as little as 60 seconds. There is no radiation, no powerful magnetic fields - just sound and water and 60 seconds. Our goal at Midjourney Medical is to deploy around 50,000 of these scanners around the world over the next 6 years and use this fleet of sensors to do a billion full-body scans every month. Our first location will be in San Francisco and will open at the end of 2027. The center itself is a flagship health spa we are calling the "Midjourney Spa." It will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and 10 scanners with the capability to do more body scans a year than all MRI scanners on Earth combined."