Global RETFound
Benefits
The Global RETFound initiative aims to develop the first globally representative AI foundation model in medicine using 100 million eye images collected from over 65 countries. This model addresses bias in healthcare AI by creating one of the most geographically and ethnically diverse medical datasets. It will be evaluated across multiple ophthalmic and systemic diseases including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration and cardiovascular disease. The model will be released under a Creative Commons license, making it freely available for non-commercial research worldwide.
Details
- Tool name
- Global RETFound
- Organisation
- Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
- Status
- planned
- AI method (as recorded)
- Machine Learning, Computer Vision
- AI method (normalised tags)
- Machine Learning Computer Vision
- Usecase
- Health AI
- Origin
- moorfields.nhs.uk
- Owning team
- Research consortium led by Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, University College London (UCL), National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Date added
- 8 September 2025
- Scrape date
- Source note
- The initiative builds on the success of RETFound, the first foundation model for retinal and systemic disease detection published in Nature in 2023. The Global RETFound Consortium uses a flexible, two-pronged data sharing framework to accommodate varying technical capacities and regulatory requirements across participating institutions. The project is supported by NIHR Moorfields Biomedical Research Centre and Moorfields Eye Charity. [Source]