Google details TB screening in the field: a partner device has read 25,000 chest X-rays, and open MedGemma has passed 10 million downloads
A full path from paper to clinic: certification, deployment, then open models that countries build on themselves. This looks at how open foundation models get used in a regulated field.
// Key points
- Partner Nexus AI turned Google's chest X-ray algorithms into a certified diagnostic tool with EU MDR Class IIb and ISO 13485. It runs in about 40 facilities across six countries, where over 90 clinicians have evaluated more than 25,000 chest X-rays, with results in as little as 45 seconds.
- Through HAI-DEF Google open-sourced chest X-ray embeddings and the medical vision-language model MedSigLIP, and released MedGemma, open-weight multimodal models in 4B and 27B sizes that run on-device offline; MedGemma has passed 10 million downloads.
- Indonesia's Ministry of Health, aiming to screen 50 million people a year, is fine-tuning MedGemma and MedSigLIP on domestic chest X-rays, running on local infrastructure so patient data stays in the country.
- HeAR, trained on over 300 million audio segments, screens from cough sounds recorded on a standard smartphone microphone.
Builder's takeFor anyone selling to enterprises or regulated industries this is more useful than a model launch: open weights plus local deployment solve the rule that data can't leave the country, not just cost. Selling to hospitals or governments, I'd put runs offline and fine-tunes on the customer's own machines on page one of the proposal.
// Background · from #Google
Full timeline →- Oct 23 Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed) launches: the Claude API run by Anthropic, reached through a Google Cloud project, with IAM for access and Marketplace for billing
- Oct 22 OpenAI's frontier models and Codex workflows are coming to Google Cloud through Model Garden and Google Cloud Marketplace
- Oct 20 Gemini Notebook lets users review an outline before Slide Decks and Video Overviews render, rolling out globally over the next week