A Japanese company called Iris has developed Nodoca, an AI-powered device that analyses images of a patient's throat to assess conditions such as influenza in around 10 seconds, sparing patients the discomfort of the traditional deep-nasal swab test. Founded in 2017 by former emergency physician Sho Okuyama, the company built its own camera hardware and gathered training data from scratch, since no such dataset previously existed, opening up a diagnostic approach that had gone largely unexplored.

Nodoca became the first AI-equipped medical device in Japan to be approved as a "new medical device" and covered by national health insurance in 2022, and it is now used in more than 2,000 Japanese medical institutions; it gained an additional Covid-19-related approval in October 2025. Its accuracy has improved steadily as clinical use generates more anonymised data, with its image library growing from hundreds of thousands to several million, creating a data advantage that has so far kept competitors out. Okuyama believes the technology could eventually extend beyond infectious diseases to detect conditions such as diabetes and hypertension from throat imagery, potentially enabling a single photograph to support a broad range of tests within a decade.