Google ARDA retinal AI tops one million patients screened

Google's ARDA retinal screening model has been used on more than one million patients across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by a team drawn from Google and its three partner sites.

The anchor sites are Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia. The authors deliberately picked settings at very different points on the resource spectrum. "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.

Google does not operate the screening itself. It licenses the Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, known as ARDA, to three commercial operators: Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra. Those partners are carrying the tool into day-to-day clinical use, with a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

Two of the researchers we follow in our Who's Who directory shared the Comment on the day it posted, treating it as a deployment benchmark more than a vendor case study.

The piece is a lessons-learned Comment, not a performance paper, and the abstract carries no per-site sensitivity or specificity numbers for the one-million-patient run.