A recent Nature Medicine article offered an early look at AI-TEC (AI-Agent Augmented Tsinghua Eye Clinic), a new framework now being used at Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital in China.
To power AI-TEC, the researchers combined two powerful AI engines that worked with different types of patient information. Qwen3.5-35B handled text, helping to understand patient histories and create structured summaries, while RETFound, a retinal foundation model, evaluated eye images, including fundus photographs that show the back of the eye.