Google ARDA retinal AI tops one million patients screened

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening tool has crossed one million patients, and the people who ran the deployments are now writing up what it took to get there. The venue is a Nature Medicine Comment published 23 September 2026, anchored in three unlike-each-other sites: the Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia.

The authors frame the piece as "scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings – in India, Thailand and Australia," aimed at "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

The tool is ARDA, Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment. Google does not run the clinics. It licenses ARDA to Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, who deliver the service at no cost to patients, with a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

The byline carries the point. Corresponding author Richa Tiwari of Google writes alongside Sunny Virmani and Yossi Matias of Google and three clinician co-authors from the deployment sites: Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi Hospital, Kim Ramasamy at Aravind Eye Care, and Angus Turner at the Lions Eye Institute. This is a deployment-lessons report rather than a new model paper. Two researchers we track in our Who's Who posted the paper's source link on Bluesky.