In 2022, it became the first AI-equipped medical device in Japan to receive approval as a “new medical device” and gain coverage under the national health insurance system. “When people hear ‘medical AI,’ they tend to think of the part that makes diagnoses,” Okuyama says. When the company was founded in 2017, there was no training data for AI focused on the throat. The number of throat images, which had been in the hundreds of thousands before launch, has now grown to several million. The Nodoca system uses AI to analyze images of the pharynx captured by a small camera-equipped device.