Google's ARDA retinal AI crosses one million patients screened

Google's diabetic retinopathy screening model has been run on more than one million patients across sites in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026 by a team of Google researchers and clinicians at three partner institutions.

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. The tool is Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA, which the company has licensed to three commercial operators: Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra. Google has previously set a target of six million AI-supported screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

The authors describe their work as "scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings" and say the exercise offers "cross-cutting insights that may inform the expansion of healthcare artificial intelligence globally."

Two researchers in our Who's Who directory flagged the piece as it circulated. It is framed as deployment lessons rather than a model-performance paper, and the text available this run does not publish per-site accuracy or complication figures for the one-million-patient cohort.