Google's diabetic retinopathy AI passes one million patients

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model has now been deployed across three health systems on three continents, with more than a million patients screened, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on September 23. The authors, led by Google's Richa Tiwari, describe the rollout across Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok and Lions Outback Vision in Western Australia as the basis for 'cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally.'

The three anchor sites are, in the paper's own framing, 'geographically and economically distinct': a high-volume Indian eye hospital, a Thai national tertiary center, and a rural outreach service in Western Australia. The same underlying model has supported more than 600,000 screenings in clinics to date, and Google has committed to delivering 'six million AI-enabled screenings to communities in need at no cost to patients over the next decade' across India and Thailand. That scale is being reached through licensing partnerships with Forus Health, AuroLab and Thailand's Perceptra.

Co-authors on the Comment include Kim Ramasamy and Ravindran Padmanabhan of the Aravind Medical Research Foundation, Paisan Ruamviboonsuk of Rajavithi Hospital, and Angus Turner of the Lions Eye Institute. The work was funded by Alphabet Inc.; Ruamviboonsuk discloses paid consultancies with Roche, Biocon Biologics, Abbott, 4DMT and Bayer. Two of the researchers we follow in AI Weekly's Who's Who shared the paper's link this week.