Google ARDA eye AI tops one million patients screened
TL;DR
- Google's ARDA diabetic retinopathy model has screened over a million patients across India, Thailand and Australia, per a Nature Medicine Comment dated 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.
- Google licenses ARDA to Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, which run the screenings at no cost to patients; the Comment targets six million screenings in India and Thailand within ten years.
A Google diabetic retinopathy screening model has been used on more than a million patients across three health systems in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment in Nature Medicine published 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, Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment (ARDA), is licensed to three commercial partners (Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra) that run the service at no cost to patients. The Comment flags a target of six million screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.
The byline mixes Google staff (Richa Tiwari, Rajroshan Sawhney and Kasumi Widner) with clinicians at the partner sites, including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner at the Lions Eye Institute. The deployment, the authors write, "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."
The piece is a Comment, not a fresh accuracy study: the abstract publishes no per-site diagnostic numbers alongside the deployment total. Two researchers we follow posted the paper.
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Originally reported by nature.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Practical lessons in the global scaling of clinical AI: from one hospital to over a million patients screened - Nature Medicine