Google's ARDA eye AI crosses one million patients screened

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model, ARDA, has crossed one million patients screened across sites in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by a team of Google researchers and clinicians at the partner sites.

The three anchor sites are the Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia. Rather than operating the screening service, Google has licensed ARDA to Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, with a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

"Scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings – in India, Thailand and Australia," the authors write, "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

The Comment is framed as a deployment-lessons piece more than a fresh accuracy study. The preview does not publish updated per-site accuracy, nor does it break down how the million screenings split across the three countries. Google's own blog last year put the ARDA count at "more than 600,000 screenings in clinics around the world," so a large share of the gap to a million has closed inside the year.

Two of the AI researchers we follow in our Who's Who had already surfaced the paper by the time it landed in our scanner.