Ultrasonic waves can penetrate most structures in humans, including the brain. For example, with focused ultrasound (as they mentioned with MRgFUS) you can burn specific structures in the middle of the brain without any incision.
To use this for imaging, you need lots of transducers (MRgFUS typically uses 1024 for ablation, and Midjourney is proposing 358,000 for imaging) and massive advances in computational tomography capabilities. There will still likely be pockets of low confidence where there's a lot of air, like in the lungs. But with sufficient information on what's happening around those areas, you'd still have something that's medically useful.
The data they show is almost certainly a normal beamforming algorithm like delay and sum, possibly with some simple speed of sound correction. The most similar paper I know of is here in Nature Biomedical Engineering from a team at Caltech. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01660-4
Pedantry appreciated.
This is a fever dream, not a practical diagnostic technology.
I can imagine it being useful if you happened to own an imaging product and wanted to train a model on human body shapes and sizes.
But dunking people in a golden spa - why golden? why not pink or teal? - and waving a ring of US over them, at distances which make high resolution impractical, to tell them their medical fortunes is... eccentric.
I'm being scathing because there's no solid science behind this, and if there had been solid science MJ would have published it in a paper.
This is pure marketing. And if you're going to do that, you should at least include some dolphin petting.
Radiologist as well. Remember this is full wave inversion not pulsed wave B mode. You can get much more useful information from both high low frequency and capture transmitted waves.
There is promise with this and we use it for example with MRgFUS. With advanced computational models or patient specific CT/ZTE MR aberration correction it is theoretically very feasible to image the brain with ultrasound, whether that’s more useful than say portable low field strength MR is a different question altogether.
> This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT.
Not to be pedantic but since this is a tech forum I would clarify that FWI US is computed tomography by definition (at least in this and many applications). Gas degrades conventional CT too, it’s just worse with US as you have little to no forward propagation and of course innumerable interfaces in the lungs to reflect and scatter.