Google's ARDA eye AI passes one million patients screened

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening tool ARDA has now been used on more than a million patients across three health systems in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026.

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. Google does not run the screening itself. It licenses the Automated Retinal Disease Assessment to three commercial operators, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, targeting six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years. Screenings are provided at no cost to patients.

"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," the authors write.

The paper carries 21 Google-affiliated authors alongside local clinical leads including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk in Thailand, Kim Ramasamy and Ravindran Padmanabhan in India, and Angus Turner in Australia. It is a lessons narrative rather than a fresh accuracy study: the story it tells is how a model that started in one hospital was pushed through three distinct health systems on a licensing model, and what that took. Two researchers we track shared the piece on the day it appeared.