Google ARDA eye AI passes a million patients in three countries

Over one million patients have now been screened with Google's diabetic retinopathy model across three deployments in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by Richa Tiwari, Rajroshan Sawhney and Kasumi Widner of Google with clinical co-authors including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk of Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner of the Lions Eye Institute.

The anchor sites are the Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision in Western Australia. The authors frame the piece as drawing lessons from 'scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings – in India, Thailand and Australia' that 'may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally.'

Google does not run the screening itself. It licenses the model, called ARDA, to three local operators (Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra), with a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years. A Google figure from October 2024 put the running count then at '600,000+ screenings supported globally to date.'

The published Comment does not include per-site accuracy metrics or treatment follow-through data. Two researchers we track in our Who's Who posted the paper within days of its release.