Google ARDA eye AI tops one million patients in three countries

Google's retinal screening model has been used on more than one million patients across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia. The number comes from a Comment in Nature Medicine published on 23 September 2026, with Google's Richa Tiwari as corresponding author and clinicians from each of the three anchor sites as co-authors, including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner at the Lions Eye Institute.

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. Google licenses the Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA, to Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, which run the screening at no cost to patients.

The authors pitch the write-up as portable operational lessons rather than a trial result. Scaling across the three settings, they argue, "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

The million-patient milestone sits against a target the authors name explicitly: six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years. Two researchers we track posted the Comment after it ran. The piece itself sits behind Nature's paywall at $39.95, and the Comment format publishes no per-site accuracy numbers.