Everyone Has Something - Sean Geiger

Sean Geiger

SubscribeSign in

Everyone Has Something<br>Whole body imaging and the fight of weak priors

Sean Geiger<br>Jun 19, 2026

Share

This week Midjourney announced a machine that scans your entire body in about a minute. You step into a shallow pool and a platform lowers you through a ring of submerged ultrasound sensors, and a minute later there is a map of everything inside you, with no radiation and no needle involved. The pitch is early detection: finding a cancer while it is still small enough to cut out.<br>Midjourney is best known for making AI images from text prompts. The scanner is its first piece of hardware, and the company says it eventually wants 50,000 of them doing a billion scans a month.<br>Whole body scans aren’t new. Prenuvo has been selling whole body MRIs to healthy people for five years now, and a handful of competitors have followed. What kept them rare was money. A whole body MRI runs $600 to $2,000 out of pocket and insurance won’t cover it for someone with no symptoms, so the scans went mostly to people who could afford an expensive maybe. Midjourney is promising the same thing at roughly the price of a massage, and whether their particular machine works or not, cheap whole body imaging is clearly coming.

An MRI of my neck, 2024. Incidental finding: mild degenerative disc disease. Apparently means nothing, but now I know it's there.<br>Every single person has something weird in their body. A whole body MRI of a healthy person turns up something abnormal in 80 to 97 percent of people, and almost all of it is harmless. One review of more than 6,000 screening scans found 91 percent of the findings were benign and about one percent were cancer. These machines reliably find things, and what they find is overwhelmingly noise.<br>Many doctors object for a statistical reason: in someone with no symptoms, cancer is rare, so most flagged findings are false alarms. Each one can lead to another scan, a specialist visit, sometimes a biopsy, and weeks or months of waiting.<br>What Midjourney built

The Midjourney scanner is an ultrasound device. It uses Butterfly Network’s ultrasound-on-chip, the same component in their handheld probes, arranged into a ring you pass through underwater so it images you from every angle. Midjourney licensed the technology in late 2025 . The company markets the result as “Ultrasonic CT,” which is a bit confusing, since CT means X-ray computed tomography and there are no X-rays involved, and it compares the images to MRI, which uses magnetic fields rather than sound.

The Butterfly Network ultrasound-on-chip transducers used in Midjourney’s scanner<br>By the company’s own account it’s not a diagnostic device yet. It has no FDA clearance, it currently outputs only body-composition maps of muscle and fat, and the founder, David Holz, said it doesn’t yet use any AI. The diagnostic version that would rival an MRI is a regulatory process the company says it intends to start later. The first location is a spa in San Francisco penciled in for the end of 2027, and the stated goal is 50,000 machines doing a billion scans a month, paired with a claim that enough early imaging could prevent 30 percent of deaths and half of all healthcare spending. There is no evidence I could find for that last figure.

A cross-section of Midjourney’s scanner<br>Maybe Midjourney is the company that drives whole body imaging costs down an order of magnitude, maybe it’s a competitor, but cheap and frequent scanning is coming quickly either way.<br>What whole body imaging finds

Prenuvo’s argument is that the cancers that a whole body scan turns up are disproportionately the ones nothing else would have caught in time, the cancers with no routine screening test. Their Polaris study followed about a thousand mostly asymptomatic adults and found biopsy-confirmed cancer in 2.2 percent of them, most in people who felt fine, a lot of them kidney, bladder, and ovarian cancers that tend to surface late. Among the people whose scans came back clean, 99.8 percent were still cancer-free a year later.

An example of a relatively benign finding in a Prenuvo MRI result<br>Those numbers come from the company that sells the scan and are drawn from people healthy and motivated enough to spend a few thousand dollars checking on themselves, so they are worth treating with some caution. There is no randomized trial showing that whole body MRI makes average-risk people live longer, and no mortality data at all. Prenuvo has a 100,000-person study running to look for some, and the results are years out.<br>False positives and overdiagnosis

A scan finding can be bad in two different ways:<br>The first is an ordinary false positive. The scan flags a spot, the spot looks like it could be something, you do more tests, and it turns out to be nothing. The information was wrong, and the cost was the workup it took to find that out and the anxiety in the meantime.<br>The second is overdiagnosis, which is stranger....