NUH's New Digestive Health Centre Adds Korean AI to Its Endoscopy Line-Up

Singapore's public hospitals are quietly becoming the testing ground for medical AI, and the newest example sits inside a freshly opened centre at the National University Hospital. NUH has added a South Korean diagnostic assistant called ENAD to the National University Centre for Digestive Health, giving its endoscopists a real-time AI eye for spotting lesions during upper and lower gastrointestinal procedures. It is the kind of adoption that says a lot about how far AI-assisted screening has moved from novelty to routine tooling here.

ENAD, built by Seoul-based Ainex Corporation, is an AI software-as-a-medical-device that detects lesions in real time and flags them by type during endoscopy. Ainex says NUH has formally adopted the platform across all of its endoscopy units and will expand an existing joint-clinical-research partnership to keep improving the algorithm — a relationship that began with a 2024 memorandum of understanding. The selection followed an evaluation that pitted ENAD against competitors including Medtronic, Olympus and Fujifilm, with clinical performance and technology cited as the deciding factors.

The numbers behind the choice are striking. Ainex points to a prospective multicentre randomised controlled trial involving 998 patients in which ENAD-assisted colonoscopy lifted the adenoma detection rate from 36.1% to 52.3%. That metric matters because every percentage point of improvement in adenoma detection meaningfully reduces colorectal cancer risk — a concern that looms large in Singapore, where colorectal cancer is one of the most common and deadliest cancers. NUH's own centre has pushed its detection rate from 33.5% in 2022 to 42.4% in 2025, and the AI layer is part of that broader push toward higher screening quality.

The commercial significance goes beyond one hospital. Singapore is one of the most competitive medtech markets in Asia-Pacific, and Ainex frames the NUH deal as its full-scale entry into the region, calling the country a springboard for international expansion. The company already holds approvals in seven countries and says it accounts for over 95% of Korea's AI-assisted endoscopy market. The broader pattern is unmistakable: as Singapore's Health Sciences Authority tightens and streamlines medical device regulation, overseas AI developers increasingly view local public hospitals as the validation they need before scaling regionally.

Why it matters for Singapore: For patients, AI-assisted endoscopy means polyps and early cancers are more likely to be caught when they are most treatable, a real win given the ageing population. For the ecosystem, NUH's willingness to iterate on a foreign startup's algorithm through joint research positions Singapore as more than a buyer of imported AI — it is shaping how that AI behaves. The centre's climb in detection rates, with AI as a growing contributor, is exactly the kind of measurable outcome that makes Singapore a credible reference market for medical AI worldwide.