Google's ARDA eye AI tops one million patients screened

Google's diabetic eye-screening model has been used on more than a million patients across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026.

The paper anchors on three sites: Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia. The tool is Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA, with Richa Tiwari of Google listed as lead author.

Google does not run the screening itself. It licenses ARDA to three commercial operators, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, which carry the model into day-to-day clinical workflows and run the service at no cost to patients. The stated goal is six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years, up from more than 600,000 clinic screenings reported in late 2024.

The authors frame the piece as a deployment-lessons Comment, writing that scaling the tool across three highly distinct settings "offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

This is not an outcomes paper. Per-site sensitivity, specificity and completed-referral numbers for the million screens are not reported in the public coverage. Two of the researchers we track surfaced the paper shortly after it went live.