Google eye AI passes one million patients in three countries

Google's diabetic retinopathy detection model has now been used to screen more than a million patients across three health systems in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment in Nature Medicine from the Google Research team and their clinical partners.

The three anchor sites are the Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Nedlands, Western Australia. The authors, led by Richa Tiwari, Rajroshan Sawhney and Kasumi Widner of Google, with Paisan Ruamviboonsuk of Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner of the Lions Eye Institute among the coauthors, describe the deployment as one that "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally." A couple of the clinical-AI researchers we follow shared the link within days of publication.

Scaling out from the anchor hospitals has run through three licensed partners: Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra. Together they are targeting six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand over the next ten years.

This is a lessons Comment rather than a fresh diagnostic-accuracy trial. Per-country sensitivity numbers, workflow-integration notes and regulatory-friction detail sit in the paywalled article rather than the public abstract retrieved for this piece.