Google diabetic-retinopathy AI tops a million patients screened

Google's deep-learning tool for diabetic retinopathy has now screened more than a million patients, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by Richa Tiwari, Rajroshan Sawhney, Kasumi Widner and co-authors from Google and three partner hospitals.

The anchor sites are Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia. Rather than run the screenings itself, Google licensed the model to three in-country commercial partners, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, which operate the deployments. The authors frame the three sites as a template, writing that the work "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

Context matters for the trajectory. Google had reported more than 600,000 AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand as of October 2024, and has said it targets six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years; the million-patient line sits roughly on that path. Two of the clinician-researchers we follow in our Who's Who posted the paper the week it went up.