Matt: Midjourney Medical

I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but I was so excited to watch the Midjourney Medical launch from afar. This is a really big deal. David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds.

You can re-watch the livestream here, which I recommend. You might remember David from Leap Motion, which I blogged back in 2012. It’s so cool to a small but mighty independent company innovate and apply learnings across seemingly disparate sectors.

I wish all my friends in jazz and the arts who are despondent about tech could meet David:

“We’re going to be a little confusing for the next six months as we announce all the things, but I’m hoping as they all are out there, they form a picture which I hope feels cohesive. Most of them are around creativity, but some of them, like this, are just around positive human futures that we actually want to be a part of. And I think this is an important thing for AI companies to do—for all humans to do.” — David Holz

If you understand imaging, you know the tradeoffs between X-ray, CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), and ultrasound, and Midjourney’s approach doesn’t cover everything, but what’s incredible is the speed, amount of data, and using AI to process and get something useful out of it. Ultrasonics will be an incredibly exciting area over the next few years, first for imaging and later for intervention. I can imagine a future where you dip into one of these once a month just to keep an eye on things, not just to find bad stuff but to see the impact of exercise or dietary changes.

We’re fairly new to scanning healthy people, and I always advise friends getting their first whole-body MRI with Biograph or Prenuvo that it’s very common to hear something scary at first, only to find it’s benign. Also, I’ve now heard many examples of things that were caught and treated early, years before they might otherwise have been noticed.