Google ARDA eye AI tops one million patients in three countries

Google's diabetic retinopathy model has now been used on more than one million patients, across three anchor sites in India, Thailand, and Australia. The deployment is the subject of a Nature Medicine Comment published 23 September 2026 by a team of Google researchers and clinicians at the partner hospitals.

The three 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. Named clinician co-authors include Kim Ramasamy at Aravind, Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi, and Angus Turner at Lions Outback Vision.

The authors frame their account as offering "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally." It reads as "a deployment-lessons piece more than a model paper."

Google has licensed the model, ARDA (Automated Retinal Disease Assessment), to Forus Health, AuroLab, and Perceptra, which "run the screening at no cost to patients." The stated target is six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

Two of the researchers we track linked the paper directly.