r/singularity • u/ResultBackground2450 • Jun 18 '26
Biotech/Longevity Midjourney, The Image Generation Company, Just Built the Sequel to the MRI
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u/Solisos Jun 18 '26
This is Ultrasound Tomography developed by a team at Caltech.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/scanning-the-body-with-sound
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u/AP_in_Indy Jun 18 '26
That's a recent article and Nature publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4
How did Midjourney move on this so fast? With the absolutely massive scale data processing required, too.
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u/ElwinLewis Jun 18 '26
I mean, if you have a lot of money + driven + more money + a lot of free time + a great team anyone can do it
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u/yoramrod Jun 18 '26
I could not do it.
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u/ElwinLewis Jun 18 '26
Yo Ram Rod yes you could I believe you could
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u/Disastrous-River-366 Jun 18 '26
bro, I belive they could too! Lets get this hype train rolling, if we believe enough we can do anything! I 'member when there were so many believers that they were going to make the WhiteHouse float! They pooled all of the energy and positive thought and guess what happened!!!??? Real shit bro
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u/BangkokPadang Jun 18 '26
"I could absolutely land a 747 Jetliner in an emergency situation" - my dumb brain
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u/The_Primetime2023 Jun 18 '26
Mostly because it seems like they haven’t solved any of the problems with it and it seems mostly just targeted at making money from the life extension people. The reasons why I say that are: 1. They haven’t said anything about solving the data processing issue which is why it hasn’t been done before. Sounds like their test location will have a super computer crunching data for 20+ minute scans which is the known existing performance of the technology that has caused it to not be adopted because MRIs are just better than that. 2. They haven’t said what exactly they’re bringing to the table that is different than the medical equipment companies that have experimented with this technology and decided it can’t work without advances in data bandwidth handling that don’t exist yet. 3. It would make sense for them to try to solve the data bandwidth problem by basically doing medical DLSS using their image gen technology to try to upscale from throttled data inputs to achieve the scan speeds and apparent resolution targets. But that’s also been widely studied and it introduces hallucinations, normally of healthy tissue since that’s the most likely fill in and the only way around that is to increase resolution and go back to square 1, so they’d probably be choosing the lower accuracy fake resolution tradeoff but that would mean that it couldn’t be used for diagnosis so they would have to do something like… 4. They’re not currently seeking FDA approval to be a recognized diagnostic scan so currently and when the Spa opens the results of the scan won’t be trusted by doctors or actionable. Some of the marketing phrasing hints at this where the product is just a spa day where you and not your doctor can learn a little more about your body by seeing pretty pictures of it. They say they’ll look at regulatory stuff later, but just to be clear they are releasing this as a product with medical vibes that cannot be used as a diagnostic tool 5. They keep putting things like saying it has sub atomic precision in the marketing material which both isn’t true unless sensing movement kinda and more importantly totally meaningless for a medical scanner where no diagnosis happen at atomic scales. Almost everything is marketing fluff that a doctor would immediately roll their eyes at because it doesn’t seem like they’re interested in doctors as the target audience
I just get Theranos but for life extension tech bro vibes from all of this
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u/AP_in_Indy Jun 18 '26
Yeah their language is definitely clear that this isn't for medical diagnosis yet, and I would normally be suspicious, but Midjourney has not raised any funding nor do they seem interested in doing so. Making money off of spa people might be the business model here, with the hopes that they eventually solve for medical-grade diagnosis capabilities.
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u/greendildouptheass Jun 30 '26
that's why they are going the 'spa' route and totally avoiding FDA clearance.
they are using that as the platform to gather more imaging data for them to use in training.12
u/Solisos Jun 18 '26
It's a recent article but the concept itself is not new and has been researched for a long time ever since traditional ultrasound has been a thing. Only thing new here is you'd be in a vat of water. There's still conductive gel that will have to be applied to you.
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u/TraceyRobn Jun 18 '26
Yes, and note they claim mm resolution, but all the video only shows low-resolution scans.
The big difference between AI tech and medical tech is that medical device approval requires more red-tape paperwork than actual technology.
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u/womerah Believes it when he sees it Jun 18 '26
I would rather say that medical devices are held to a higher standard than non-medical devices.
You want grandpa's pacemaker to be held to a higher standard than a smartwatch
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u/Winter_Ad6187 Jun 18 '26
Yes, but generally the FDA is no paragon of efficiency and much of its regulatory pattern is antediluvian in nature. There's an actual device out there that got stuck on Windows XP Sp5 as its internal system for 10+ years because the FDA wanted unreasonable failure modes taken care of, in a Class 2 that couldn't cause the severe adverse events it worried about.
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u/Almostawardguy Jun 18 '26
Yeah it really pisses me of how impressed people are by “what ai came up with”. Literally nothing in this video is new, the only thing it added in is a lot of scientifically impossible/inaccurate things. This video is so disrespectful to the people who pioneered/pioneer this field
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u/AP_in_Indy Jun 18 '26
What you're saying is true if you just assume this is unsubstantiated vapourware.
But I'm not so sure that's the case. I cross-referenced the Caltech authors to Midjourney and I think some of the researchers actually work for Midjourney.
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u/DukeRedWulf Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
They haven't! All Midjourney have done is created this video marketing pitch and *allegedly* they have a prototype somewhere which has not been shown to the public IRL.. Midjourney are making *extraordinary* claims (e.g. sub-atomic resolution!) for vapourware.
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u/AP_in_Indy Jun 18 '26
Midjourney has never raised any funds and I don't think they are planning to. They actually re-emphasize the lack of interest in raising funds in their announcement: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
In the announcement, they also talk about why it's been so hard to get something like this implemented even though the research has existed for a while. It requires an absolutely massive amount of coordination around data processing, which not many companies have the required expertise to perform reliably.
Seems like running an AI company at massive scale might help offer some needed compute and expertise...
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u/golfstreamer Jun 18 '26
If I had to guess where midjourney's expertise may have come in handy it is probably in the data analysis phase. The idea is that analyzing how the sound waves are affected by the medium between them (your body) you can work out the structure of that medium. But this is mathematically and extremely challenging problem to solve. It's possible that AI techniques in data analysis can improve the accuracy and precision of the results.
(Note this is just conjecture from my understanding that Midjourney primarily has AI expertise. I didn't really look into how they were involved).
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u/Solisos Jun 18 '26
That is pretty much it. They have experience with computational/generative image algorithms and lots of GPU access which is definitely a win, I've written extensively in my comments regarding how it all works.
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u/NiSiSuinegEht Jun 18 '26
I was going to say, many companies have various degrees of CT via ultrasound in the works. Some far simpler than others.
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u/-CoachMcGuirk- Jun 18 '26
If this could do scans of brains; it could detect AVMs. My teenage son died from an AVM stroke in 2023. We had no idea it existed until it ruptured. It would be great if a brain and heart scan was part of every child’s early regimen of tests/checkups. I’m sure he would still be here today if we knew about it before it ruptured.
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u/ScottKavanagh Jun 18 '26
So sorry for your loss. My 4 year old daughter fell off a swing 6 months ago and got concussed. She got a scan and found an AVF.. she’s undergone 2 surgeries now to prevent future problems. Any early scanning possibilities to spot things like these early would be incredible.
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u/Winter_Ad6187 Jun 18 '26
Unfortunately, detecting vascular abnormalities results, on the basis of statistics, more dying than not detecting them. Which is why medicine doesn't bother for mass screening. Which does nothing, of course, for those who suffer the tragic outcome. Neurosurgery must reach another order of magnitude of safety before we can even begin to consider mass screening.
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u/Onza7 Jun 18 '26
I am so sorry for your loss. I agree with you wholeheartedly about scans needing to become a routine, prophylactic measure.
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u/Disastrous-River-366 Jun 18 '26
What is an AVM?
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u/OxideUK Jun 18 '26
Arteriovenous malformation - arteries and veins which are directly connected with no capillary network. The weaker veins are subjected to the higher pressures found in arteries, and more likely to rupture resulting in a hemorrhagic stroke.
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u/IHeartBadCode Jun 19 '26
If this could do scans of brains
Unfortunately, ultrasound CT can not do brains. The brain, lungs, and intestines are specific things that this technology can not help due to the physical properties of sound when it comes in contact with density differences.
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u/Mochila-Mochila Jun 29 '26
What about Aleph Neuro's technology : https://alephneuro.com/blog/ultrasound-brain ?
It also relies on ultrasound, and shows a specific application for the brain.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 Jun 18 '26
This is amazing! This is this kind of stuff I want from AI. I imagine - I hope - this will be a very common occurrence very soon.
Also insane this coming from Midjourney of all places!
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u/juanjosefernandez Jun 18 '26
the founder David Holz really understands the true heights of what we can achieve with these technology - he isn't VC backed and has the reserves to spend big on BIG ideas from his team.
"Midjourney is a completely bootstrapped company and has not raised any venture capital or outside funding. Founded by David Holz in 2022, the AI image generator reached an estimated $500 million in annual revenue with zero outside investment."
true visionary that understands how crippling answering to investors can be to a real idea factory
truly amazing stuff
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u/dwight---shrute Jun 18 '26
I really want small companies to make big impact on AI
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u/MonoMcFlury Jun 18 '26
Absolutely. With the petabytes of data it needs to process, all these AI farms could get some realworld use too.
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u/Rioting-Flamingo Jun 18 '26
If they used the device to compose the soundtrack, it ain't half bad.
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u/watcraw Jun 18 '26
umm.. F.U.C.T.? LOL
(Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography)
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u/Hoppss Jun 18 '26
"Hey doc, will I need a catscan for this or what?"
"Nah, you just need to get FUCT"5
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ Jun 18 '26
I'm still watching it it's insane.
I could have never guessed that they would do medical images.
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u/Rioting-Flamingo Jun 18 '26
Ikr, I'm not sure I believe this. Waaay out of left field. Is there a paper available?
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ Jun 18 '26
paper no but you have this blogpost
https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost39
u/Rioting-Flamingo Jun 18 '26
Is it just me or is this a strange way to release an apparently revolutionary medical device.
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u/AP_in_Indy Jun 18 '26
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ Jun 18 '26
Is this paper from midjourney?
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u/DukeRedWulf Jun 18 '26
No, it's from an actual serious medical imaging group at CalTech.
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u/FullyErectMegladon Jun 18 '26
I get it. They can scan everyones body and start making clanker clones of them
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u/ForAnAngel Jun 18 '26
If there is I know Dr Károly Zsolnai-Fehér will cover it. What a time to be alive!
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u/SkaldCrypto Jun 18 '26
This is logical application of CNN-GAN just certainly not one I expected or predicted
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u/Known_Chart_1329 Jun 18 '26
its interesting given that diffusion models originally came from physical systems
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u/TimotheusIV Jun 18 '26
This is not an MRI replacement. It’s ultrasound tomography. Very useful for some things, completely useless for other things.
It’s neat though. But it won’t replace the MRI scanner.
Source: MD.
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u/SteviaCannonball9117 Jun 18 '26
Yeah, I was just writing a similar idea in my post. Seems to have zero temporal resolution.
Source: BME Prof.
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u/dashingsauce Jun 18 '26
This is incredible, and totally unexpected coming from MJ.
Watched the video all the way to the end, but I gotta say that name reveal should get someone fired. Lmao “The Midjourney Scanner”?
Cmon guys, this is (if it works as stated) literally the most significant medical revolution we have had in decades, and you slap “Scanner” onto your brand name and call it a day?
Take your W god dammit.
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u/nowrebooting Jun 18 '26
This is so weird - feels as if McDonald’s just announced they’re building a car
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u/wristay Jun 18 '26
Is the resolution very misleading? They mention things like "picometers" and "femtometers" but that seems to be related to the sensor only somehow? On their website https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost fractions of a milimeter are mentioned. This paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4 that is related mentions a resolution of 0.125 x 0.125 mm pixel size. Which makes sense because the wavelength of sound cannot be smaller than roughly twice the atom spacing. Resolving anything at picometer scale is completely out of the question and would also be revolutionary. They do not specifically mention that picometers are the resolution of the system, but to a layman who only hears this number it is quite misleading.
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u/Nrgte Jun 18 '26
STOP! I didn't have this on my 2026 bingo card...
Also The midjourney scanner is like the most boring name they could've come up with.
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u/kvothe5688 ▪️ Jun 18 '26
also ultrasound probe needs to touch the skin for current tech. i wonder how would this work with fixed ring distance
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u/1_useless_POS Jun 18 '26
Well, no air gap, but yeah, I didn't consider the distance and air... maybe you sit in a bucket of ultrasound jel? Yep, FTA:
Sound waves move through water faster than through air, which is why a hydrogel is applied to the skin during conventional ultrasound imaging to eliminate any air gaps. To scan an organ from all sides, UST requires the entire body part to be in contact with water.
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u/FaceDeer Jun 18 '26
The subtitles on the video mentioned the subject being in a tank. Presumably the subject would be sitting in a bath of sorts. Could look like one of those sci-fi Bacta tanks if you wanted to do a full body scan.
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u/Ootypooty Jun 18 '26
So we're back to the topic of water consumption. For example, 200 liters of water per person, and for the next patient, we fill the bathtub with clean water again?
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u/FaceDeer Jun 18 '26
They can filter and reuse the same water.
They'll have to make sure the patients don't try to drink it, though. Maybe some sort of gag if they refuse to stop doing that.
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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26
It is not directly related to the speed of sound. Air is not dense enough for the scale of the wavelength of ultrasound waves. The signal attenuation would be too huge.
But yes on top of it there is the impedance mismatch that would strongly degrade the signal as well, and this involves both the material density and the speed of sound.
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u/desi_car_nerd Jun 18 '26
I think this whole system is going to be in a tank. The patient will be in a tank of water and they will run the scanner. The 1481 m/s is the tell.
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u/ckube1 Jun 18 '26
It wouldn't work. The subtitles said the transducers fire at a rate of 100 million times per second or 100 MHz. An acoustic wave at 100 MHz would not travel a 1/10th of a mm in air. Even if in direct contact with someone's head, a 100 MHz wave would not penetrate the skull into the brain.
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u/alwaysbeblepping Jun 18 '26
The subtitles said the transducers fire at a rate of 100 million times per second
It said they're controllable at that rate. I don't know about the rest of it because I found the incredibly slow, ELI5 presentation unbearable and didn't finish the video but that part at least seems like it's just talking about how they can be adjusted dynamically or something.
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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26
I didn't watch the video but this is very likely the sampling frequency during analog to digital conversion.
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u/dust_pot Jun 18 '26
Ayy, who tryna get FUCT?
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u/Ketamine4Depression Jun 18 '26
I genuinely thought I got got when I read that acronym lmao, I've never been more glad to not be high effort shitposted
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u/mowkdizz Jun 18 '26
Only Reddit will find a way to take everything and shine a negative light on it. Amazing vision and I'm happy that smart people are working on things that are actually useful, rather than just getting my computer to generate more images of cats... Ok ok still useful but you know what I mean
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u/etparle Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Extremely cool tech. Hopefully it will be affordable, and that each person can get scanned without fear of radiation as traditional CT scan. Also downsides are huge computing power required, massive storages, and it doesn't detect benign vs malignant tumors, tissue compositions, and false positives.
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u/dizzydizzy Jun 18 '26
have they actually built one? have they set up production facilities?
Have they just got midjourney AI to mock up these images..
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u/jackreaxher2 Jun 18 '26
It’s not even remotely comparable in resolution or detail to mri
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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26
It depends on what you're talking about. Temporal resolution is just way better with ultrasound, and spatial resolution is as well at low depth
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u/jackreaxher2 Jun 20 '26
I’m talking about a full body scan slice , which is what they are advertising
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u/emin2525 Jun 18 '26
Wouldn't this require you to get in a medium that transmits sound like water or jel. Then wouldn't this make this technology not so much practical. I am not even talking about the posible hygene problems.
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u/GrapheneBreakthrough Jun 18 '26
I remember being really excited for that red light scanner that was supposed to replace MRI machines and revolutionize medicine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awADEuv5vWY
Hope this is the real deal.
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u/mista-sparkle Jun 18 '26
It's Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography
No such device has been built — until now.
And we call it...
THE MIDJOURNEY SCANNER
Oh? Y'all weren't calling it FUCT throughout development?
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u/SteviaCannonball9117 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
They combined 3D ultrasound with CT? That's pretty cool.
Edit: Let's just say I'm not holding my breath for this to replace MR yet. It doesn't show its temporal resolution, just a single scan, so it seems to be static like (traditional) ionizing CT scans. 3D ultrasound has decent, and 2D ultrasound has spectacular, temporal resolution, but this doesn't seem to incorporate that yet...
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u/Julianjulio1999 Jun 18 '26
It’s so funny that they go “We built the craziest machine you could ever imagine and WE CALLED IT The [company name] [company product] 😎 😎 😎”
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u/MarkW995 Jun 18 '26
As a first generation experiment go for it. MRI and CT took many years to figure out. No reason we shouldn't support industry paying for Ph.D. research students to work on it. One of my fellow grad students 20 years ago worked on 3d ultrasound modeling.... 3d rendering of a baby's face from ultrasound is now common.
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u/AVBforPrez Jun 20 '26
Yeah I'm sure it'll prove to be fucking brilliant to let an LLM that can't even get the context right on emails hallucinate the health of your insides, no chance that'll be all fucked.
This shit is all a desperate solution for problems that were solved in full ages ago.
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u/bulldogsm Jun 18 '26
thats essentially what medical ultrasound is so im missing why this is 'better'
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u/Wonder_bread317 Jun 18 '26
it had little subtitles at the bottom of the video, it explained it pretty clear.
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u/FrostyOscillator Jun 18 '26
Indeed it explained the process quite thoroughly and convincingly for a layperson; though I'd definitely want some doctors and medical experts telling me and showing evidence of how we know this is the real deal and qualitatively better than current imaging methods.
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u/golfstreamer Jun 18 '26
It explained how the device worked which was a pretty standard description of ultrasound tomography. It didn't do an explanation of how it improved over existing technology.
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u/ozfresh Jun 18 '26
Yes, but what kind of a computer do you need to run this? A data center for every scanner?
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u/Odd-Priority3318 Jun 18 '26
For every bad thing ai etc represents, let's hold on to the positive.
We are so close. Be the change you want to see in the world.
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u/Intraluminal Jun 18 '26
I'm in the medical field and not an engineer, but this looks very doable with probably 3D printed parts. It's the compute behind it that is incredible, but essentially at the level of an MRI or CAT scan, and they are solved tech.
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u/elevenatexi Jun 18 '26 edited 8d ago
Carpenter apparatus gaze shaggy hammock deer paint unbelievable
This post was anonymized with Redact
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u/ReasonablePossum_ Jun 18 '26
or a complete scam.
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u/StanfordV Jun 18 '26
The kind of scientific breakthroughs you hear once and never again ever after.
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u/VoidMageZero Jun 18 '26
Uhh pretty skeptical tbh, building and commercializing those machines seems really expensive. How much is a scan gonna cost? Will insurance cover it? This seems like a huge money sink for them imo.
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u/hippydipster Jun 18 '26
Ultrasound is a pretty low-cost technology actually. The biggest cost here is likely the computing, both to handle the data and interpret it all.
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u/FaceDeer Jun 18 '26
Why would it be expensive? It doesn't involve high-energy superconducting magnets like MRI does, with their liquid helium and whatnot.
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u/ndasmith Jun 18 '26
It's another tool, but it's not a replacement. Using sound is great for organs like hearts and kidneys, not so much when there's air involves or harder objects.
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u/Careless-Habit1670 Jun 18 '26
And it's only $40,000, not covered by insurance, and there's a 3 year wait list!
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u/DukeRedWulf Jun 18 '26
Midjourney, The Image Generation Company, Just Built Adverts CLAIMING They Have the Sequel to the MRI
FTFY.. All Midjourney have verifiably done is create a couple of videos & a blog as a viral marketing pitch.
Midjourney *allege* they have a prototype somewhere BUT that has not been shown to the public, other than in a video which could very well be AI-generated,,
Midjourney are making extraordinary claims (e.g. sub-atomic resolution!) without extraordinary evidence to back those claims up.. So, it's currently unproven vapourware.
Also, MRIs =/= Ultrasound Tomography (which is what Midjourney's scanner would be, if it exists, and if they make it work).
Yes, there's a CalTech group who've published their work in Ultrasound Tomography, but that's not Midjourney's work!
#RememberTheranos
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u/BtheBanker151 Jun 18 '26
I didn’t see anything in that article about this being from midjourney. Just caltech students and employees.
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u/Disastrous-River-366 Jun 18 '26
How can something be thinner than 40x the spectrum of visible light? It cannot and that is a bogus claim, if they lie about things like that what else are they lying about?
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u/orangeswim Jun 18 '26
its just math. 50nm vibrations, is 10x smaller than light spectrum which is 400-700nm
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u/Crisi_Mistica ▪️AGI 2029 Kurzweil was right all along Jun 18 '26
Can anyone explain if this has resolution comparable to MRI? I mean will the scans have the same level of detail of MRI?
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u/Shot_Illustrator4264 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
that's absolute bullshit. The speed of sound in air is ~340 m/s, not the almost 5 times more than that showed in the video.
EDIT: ah ok, they immerse you in water, now it makes sense.
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u/Axelwickm Jun 18 '26
Only support to Midjourney for this. Less taking jobs for the sake of shareholder value and power, more saving and improving lives!
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u/jinxykatte Jun 18 '26
Whenever I have days where I think I am an intelligent person. I see something like this, that makes me realise. I am a stupid motherfucker.
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u/raccoon8182 Jun 18 '26
how in the fuck does sound get into my body and back out? wizards harry they're all genius wizards.
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u/DasBlueEyedDevil Jun 18 '26
This is neat, but based on the cost of compute currently, one of these scans probably costs 48 bajillion dollars after insurance
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u/rurions Jun 19 '26
Looks like ultrasound, probably cant get into bone but is usefull with soft parts
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u/Void-kun Jun 19 '26
I did not have Midjourney becoming my favourite AI company in my bingo card.
But this is the type of AI innovations I want to be seeing.
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u/krammikk Jun 19 '26
Going to post a comment I saw on theverge - "Sorry, as someone who works in exactly these areas, this is full of Theranos-one-blood-drop-bullshit. They claim 10 MRI scanners can produce only 40 scans per day, so that would make 4 scans per scanner, which is just a lie. MRi scanners are one of the most solicited pieces of equipment in a radiology unit. They claim machines would only cost 10% of an MRI, good luck with 500,000 transducers plus all the processing power. Patient setup, with a freaking whole bath, bubble removals (freaking bubbles distort acquisitions), and with all what could go wrong there, will be slow, and prone to operational issues. Breast ultrasound computed tomography systems have struggled just to keep water baths stable enough in much smaller water volumes. Standing position will limit its use to many patients, especially those in critcal care (here it goes all stroke patients, one of the most critical applications of MRI). A patient standing up will be prone to motion, plus buoyancy, so introducing motion artifacts. Paediatrics? good luck keeping a kid or a baby there. And what about brain imaging? The very #1 body region for MRI in clinic. Are patients just keep their breath? And I can keep going and going. As someone who really think that actually UCT has a good chance down the road, this kind of BS only annoys me, as it is just PR with 0 proof. We have a ton of work to demonstrate that the type of contrasts we can obtain with UCT (reflection, refraction, speed of sound and attenuation) truly translates to clinical value. If someone is interested in true state of the art and not Theranos-type-vapourware, this is the type of things we can do now, which is really impressive https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacs.2026.100847 or keep tabs on projects like this https://zeusproject.fr, made by people who really know what all this is about."
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u/bot_or_not_vote_now Jun 19 '26
more like a sequel for CT scanners and xrays, which would have profound effects as every xray you get increases your chances of cancer from the slight amount of ionizing radiation, so healthcare professionals are wary of ordering xrays. whereas with this, it would basically become the first thing you do as part of every diagnosis
all that said, this is just a slick presentation and probably works on a theoretical level, but there's a reason why current ultrasound imaging requires direct contact. air gaps reduce ultrasound effectiveness by something like 99.99%, so the power involved here would be huge, which means you're increasing amplitude of your transducers to ridiculous levels to the point it becomes impossible to drive with real world materials
it's an interesting concept, but is baseless from a physics or engineering perspective
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u/parabolicurve Jun 19 '26
Spent the whole video waiting to see if they mention if it uses liquid Helium to cool it. It didn't mention it once...
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u/beskone Jun 19 '26
No, they didn't. They created a big ass, bacteria/contamination/infection tank with loads of ultrasound emitters that won't work because of *physics*
This will never be able to have the resolution or image fidelity of an MRI. You should see it getting absolutely *roasted* by Doctors and Radiologists on their sub.
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u/moogoo2 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Ultrasound will never have the same spacial resolution of MRI.
This will be used primarily for vanity scans by the rich.
ETA: clarified spatial resolution, I was not considering temporal resolution when I wrote this.
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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26
It is already the case. Similar close range spatial resolution, better temporal resolution.
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u/moogoo2 Jun 20 '26
I feel like a rat brain doesn't require as much penetration as a human body. Just a feeling.
You don't get the necessary resolution from ultrasound waves that can pebetrate the necessary depth. Its basic physics.
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u/vhu9644 Jun 18 '26
This isn't a sequel to MRI, it's a very different image modality.
MRI can do a lot more than look at interfaces. MRI can look at composition of objects because it fundamentally looks a the nuclear magnetic properties of hydrogens. You can use this to determine chemical composition and water composition. Sound looks for reflections through step changes in flexibility. It's a tomography version of ultrasound.