Google retinal AI tops one million patients in three countries

Google says its diabetic eye-disease screening model has now been used on more than one million patients across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia, in a deployment write-up published 23 September 2026 as a Comment in Nature Medicine, led by Google's Richa Tiwari with clinical collaborators at each site.

The three anchor sites span very different health systems: 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 work as offering "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

The tool, called Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA, is licensed to three commercial partners, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, which run the screening at no cost to patients. Google has publicly set a target of six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years, up from more than 600,000 globally as of October 2024.

The piece is a Comment, not a new accuracy study. Per-site sensitivity, follow-up rates and the country-by-country breakdown of the million-patient figure sit behind the journal paywall.