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

Over a million patients have been screened with Google's diabetic retinopathy detection model across three health systems in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026.

The 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. The authors, a mix of Google staff including Yossi Matias and Sunny Virmani alongside clinicians at those sites, frame the piece as a lessons-learned write-up rather than a new results paper.

"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," they write.

Google does not run the screenings itself. It licenses the model, Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, to three commercial operators, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, who deploy it in-country. The stated target is six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years, at no cost to patients. Two of the clinicians we follow in our Who's Who index flagged the paper on the day it ran.

The Comment does not publish per-site accuracy or treatment-follow-through numbers in the version available; most of the listed authors are Alphabet employees, and the work was Alphabet-funded. Clinical co-author Paisan Ruamviboonsuk discloses consulting relationships with Roche, Biocon Biologics, Abbott, 4DMT and Bayer.