Google ARDA eye AI screens one million across three countries

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model has crossed one million patients screened across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026.

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. The tool is Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA. The piece is written by a mix of Google researchers and partner clinicians, with corresponding author Richa Tiwari of Google and co-authors including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk of Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner of the Lions Eye Institute.

The framing is deployment, not model performance. The authors describe the work as "scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings" that "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

Google does not operate the screenings itself. It has licensed ARDA to three commercial partners, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, and the stated target is six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years. Two of the researchers we follow were sharing the paper within its first week out.

Per-site accuracy numbers, downstream referral and treatment data, and the pricing split between Google, the licensees and the health systems are not laid out in the public material retrieved for this write-up.