Midjourney Medical

51:07>> this is very cool. >> Super super fascinating. Great story. That's our story number two. I'm going to ceue up a story number three for you which interestingly is related >> to our story number two. >> We didn't plan this but we should. >> Right. Right. Right. [laughter] Right. This ended up being convenient even though so as you guys know with the rundown we're not going super deep into any particular story except the black hole story that was good but we >> there's still so much more I could talk about like we only spent 30 minutes on it. [laughter] I could have spent an hour and a half. You guys know me if you're regular listeners. But we try to use the rundown as a way in which to give the listeners a little

51:51taste of many of the things happening at the frontier. As we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we're trying to cover cover uh cover a couple of stories we weren't able to get to earlier in the year as we get back into now doing our normal weekly rundown. So, we're hitting what's happening as it's happening because it's happening very fast. And one story that I saw that was fascinating to me was the introduction of Midjourney Medical. And some of you who are listening may be familiar with Midjourney. For those who don't know, Midjourney is primarily known for being an image generation tool. It initially started um as a Discordon image

52:35generation thing. So they had a bot on Discord. Yeah, I remember using your Discord account to like try to mess around. There was no website. There was no interface and they were very early even before a lot of the big >> uh model providers OpenAI anthropic in terms of leaning into um image generation. So the question might be what does MidJourney Medical have to do with AI image generation? And the underlying company has created this what they're calling an ultra CT scanner. Um they've launched a healthc care division and they've now announced this fullbody ultrasound scanner that aims to image

53:17the entire body in about 60 seconds using sound waves and water uh without radiation or magnetic fields which would be the the MRI would be the comparative here which we have I talked about a lot recently on the podcast and so a lot of people's uh spidey senses went up historically a lot of tech companies make a lot of claims there's not been a single of the modern tech architecture that has moved into medical imaging >> right >> uh at any time and the founder of midjourney has done a couple of different endeavors that he's really tried to lean into saying how can we utilize something like AI image

53:58generation to create a funding vehicle for greater good purposes right instead of having to raise money all the time so this is kind of what his vision has been for some time and midjourney broke through. So the the main idea here is it's a first generation uh prototype with no FDA regulatory clearance yet and it's built on licensed technology from butterfly network rather than obviously majour's generative AI but at launch they want to offer fullbody composition maps rather than diagnostics with a first location planned for late 2027 in San Francisco. So, the idea here [music]

54:38is Midjourney wants to create these Midjourney spas. We're now looking at this video of their their prototype that they brought forth at this demo that they brought [music] for other people where you stand in what is like a circular platform that lowers you into a pool of water. [music] You're surrounded in a sea by these circular micron level size sensors. There's like thousands, millions of these sensors that [music] are sending these radio waves at you. And you're getting this real time because it's ultrasound versus MRI, you're getting this real time sort of cross-sectional scan of your body that they then through [music] a few algorithmic systems then compose a 3D image afterwards. And [music] we're

55:19going to get into some of the technical details here in a second. When you step in the water, you're staying on the platform. It's connected directly [music] to these rails and begins moving into descending down here and gently lowering about 2 in or 5 cm [music] out of the water and they have a [music] very brief technical uh video breakdown of what they're doing here. [music] So as you descend, you pass through made of about half a million tiny squares, each the size of a fine grain of sand, [music] each capable of both being a tiny speaker and a tiny microscope. So you're looking [music] top down at a human body

56:02how these uh individuals [music] sending these waves and they're measuring. >> Oh, very nice. In in in all [music] these directions, they're doing this at super super high frequency. Very nice. >> Right. And so this is now how they are you trying to push [music] um I don't want to say more different implementation of the underlying concept. No. So that's really cool. Yeah. You've got um it's the microphone and speaker that you were talking about, right? Yeah. You're sending out ultrasound and then the Yeah, it's the It reminds me of, you know, how um we mapped the Earth's

56:43interior using seismic waves. You know what I mean? like like we we figured out that there's a mantle and a core and a um inner and outer core and all that other kind of stuff because we looked at how seismic waves, earthquake waves bent around in the interior of space [music] and we deduced that there has to be like these layers in the earth's crust or under the earth's crust. And here what you're doing is effectively [music] that but you're creating fake earthquakes, right? You're creating fake little earthquakes where you can control the size and the frequency of them [music] and then you have a bunch of like sensors. That's crazy. So that's so clever. Each of the squares creates

57:24ultrasonic waves of course [music] ripples back millions of times per second and they produce obviously terabytes of >> Yeah. per second. So part of the challenge is [music] the processing pipeline. I can imagine it's not just the sensing but it's also how you process the data. So take a look here now at the next one