Google ARDA retinal AI passes one million patients screened

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model, ARDA, has been used on more than one million patients across three hospital systems in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published on 23 September 2026 in Nature Medicine. The anchor sites are Aravind Eye Care in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia.

Google does not run the screenings. It licenses ARDA to three commercial partners — Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra — which operate the service at no cost to patients. The company has publicly set a target of six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

The authors position the three deployments as a deliberate stress test of what travels. "Scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings – in India, Thailand and Australia — offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally," they write. The Comment is led by Richa Tiwari of Google, with Yossi Matias (Google), Paisan Ruamviboonsuk (Rajavithi Hospital), Angus Turner (Lions Eye Institute) and Kim Ramasamy (Aravind Eye Care System) among the co-authors. Two of the clinicians and researchers we follow had pushed the paper into our feed within hours of publication.

The Comment reports the aggregate milestone and the authors' lessons; it does not publish per-site accuracy numbers, false-negative rates, or the terms of the commercial licensing arrangements with Forus, AuroLab or Perceptra.