For most blood tests, no one asks to see the blood.
Midjourney just entered medical imaging.
The medical community is focused on clinical gaps.
The tech community is focused on scale and power.
Both may be missing the point.
The goal of Midjourney’s technology isn’t to augment current modalities or replace them.
That’s because current modalities are engineered and optimized to generate images for human eyes. Before the images are rendered on screen, several compromises have been made so that what appears on screen maps to anatomy a doctor recognizes.
Current imaging modalities trade signal for things like contrast, geometric fidelity, artifacts, image uniformity, etc. An image is, after all, subjective and qualitative, even if we hope that the interpretation it enables is not.
But the real potential of Midjourney’s approach is that it could acquire data optimized for machine analysis. We have to remember the deliverable in medical imaging is not images. It’s a report outlining medical findings that guide patient care.
Blood tests are optimized to extract a signal, reported as a number (cholesterol level, a troponin reading) and the doctor acts on that number.
The right question isn’t whether Midjourney’s images are as good as an MRI or CT scan. A machine will not need to recognize a liver to detect that something is wrong with it. Once we accept that premise, all of medical imaging can be re-imagined.
But it will still have to be validated, one marker at a time.
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