Google ARDA eye AI passes 1M patients across 3 countries

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model, ARDA, has crossed one million patients across sites in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026. The piece is written as a deployment-lessons note rather than a new model paper.

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 Western Australia. Rather than running screenings directly, Google licenses the tool to three commercial partners, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, with a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

Lead author Richa Tiwari and co-authors Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner at the Lions Eye Institute argue that scaling across "three highly distinct settings – in India, Thailand and Australia" offers "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally." The paper was already in circulation among two of the researchers we follow on publication day.

Per-site accuracy, false-negative rates and cost-per-screen are not disclosed in the public abstract. The Comment is positioned around organisation and distribution, with commercial partner licensing presented as the lesson rather than the model architecture.