Google's ARDA retinal AI passes 1M screens in three countries

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

The tool is ARDA, short for Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, and the paper is a deployment write-up rather than a new model release. Lead author Richa Tiwari of Google works with co-authors drawn from each of the three anchor sites: the Aravind Medical Research Foundation in India, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia.

"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 authors write. Google has licensed ARDA to three commercial operators, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, and funding for the work came from Alphabet Inc. Two of the AI researchers we track posted the Nature link into their networks soon after publication.

The Comment, as retrieved, does not publish a per-country patient split or clinical outcomes for the million screened; it is a lessons-learned piece, not a trial.