Google's ARDA diabetic-eye AI tops one million patients screened

Google's diabetic-retinopathy AI, ARDA, has now been used to screen more than a million patients across sites in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026. The piece, led by Google's Richa Tiwari with co-authors at the three anchor hospitals, carries the title "from one hospital to over a million patients screened" and is framed as a set of practical lessons from the scale-up.

The deployments sit at Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia. Rather than operate the screening itself, Google licenses ARDA to three local companies — Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra — that run the service inside existing clinics. Google's own announcement set the headline target in October 2024: "6 million AI-supported screenings to resource-constrained communities at no cost to patients" across India and Thailand over the following decade.

The authorship list is itself a tell. Alongside Google researchers it carries Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi, Angus Turner at the Lions Eye Institute, and Kim Ramasamy at Aravind — the clinician leads at each site. The work was funded by Alphabet, and the disclosures note that Ruamviboonsuk consults for Roche, Biocon Biologics, Abbott, 4DMT and Bayer, standard for a retinal-trial network but worth reading alongside the Comment's claims of "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

Two names on our Who's Who tracker surfaced the paper within its first week, which fits the pattern for Google Health milestone releases.