Google's ARDA eye-screening AI crosses one million patients

Google's ARDA diabetic retinopathy screening model has now been used on more than a million patients across India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by teams from Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia, and Google.

The piece is a deployment write-up, not a new accuracy study. The authors argue that "scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings offers cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally." The three anchor sites span very different health systems: a high-volume South Indian eye-care chain, a Bangkok tertiary hospital, and a remote-outreach service in Western Australia.

Google itself does not run the screenings. It licenses ARDA to three commercial operators, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, who deliver the service at the point of care. The authors describe a stated target of six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

Two researchers we follow flagged the Comment the week it dropped, which fits the pattern around ARDA: it is one of the few clinical-AI deployments publishing lessons at this scale rather than another model card.