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

Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment has now been used on more than a million patients screened for diabetic eye disease across 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. Rather than run the service itself, Google licenses ARDA to three commercial partners — Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra — which run the service at no cost to patients. Two researchers we track flagged the piece the day it ran.

Corresponding author Richa Tiwari of Google, writing with co-authors including Paisan Ruamviboonsuk of Rajavithi Hospital and Angus Turner of the Lions Eye Institute, frames the Comment as a deployment-lessons report rather than a new model paper. "Scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings," they write, offers "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

The current count is up from more than 600,000 globally as of October 2024, and the authors target six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years. The Comment itself does not publish per-site clinical performance numbers in deployment; the piece worth studying, on the authors' own framing, is the operational partner model rather than the underlying algorithm.