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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1309 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 21, 2026

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https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation.

I'm a little confused as to how Midjourney is avoiding the FDA classifying their scanner as a medical device. Are they just hoping that the feds see "spa" and don't bother to look closely? It seems like squeezing this through the general wellness exception would be a stretch.

I am not an expert in law, but my guess would be that if it doesn't do anything medical, and it doesn't diagnose anything medical then it probably doesn't trip any medical laws. It takes pictures. It's just a very fancy way of taking pictures inside your body, but not in a potentially damaging way like an X-Ray that has to be used for medical purposes in order to justify the risks.

We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.

Seems like that's their understanding too. If they want the AI to actually look through the photos and make medical conclusions based on them they need FDA approval (which they are working on getting). But if it's literally just taking images and giving them to you then it's just a really high tech camera.

MRIs and ultrasound are both imaging techniques that have pros and cons but don't use radiation (one of the pros). This reads as if it will have the functionality of a CT scan (3D, multiple images) without ionizing radiation. Pretty impressive if it works as described. Endoscopy is basically a "high tech camera" but is invasive and time-consuming. This sounds like getting in and out of water. Interested to see where this goes.

Ultrasound is very good at some things but is currently understood to be fundamentally unable to provide information about things Midjourney has made claims on. Thanks to AI I'm not going to say it's impossible (unlike say Theranos) but it certainly looks like one of those situations...

What (implausible) claims are they making? I've only seen them talk about body composition, which seems like bog-standard ultrasound + 3D modelling and edge/surface detection.

Ultrasound doesn't really give the information you'd need for a lot of things, but I did a quick lit review and it looks like nature has a paper about some novel techniques they may be copying.

Still probably snake oil but okay fair play maybe this will go somewhere.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney

Scott is not enthused.

Scott's not enthused about the overall capabilities. The closest he gets to sourcing those claims is "the SF AI crowd". Mostly, he's just preempting ideas that nobody is necessarily claiming, which is fine as far as it goes.

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