Google ARDA eye-screening AI passes one million patients

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

The tool is Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, or ARDA. Its 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 author list is a Google-plus-clinician roster: Richa Tiwari, Rajroshan Sawhney and Kasumi Widner from Google alongside Paisan Ruamviboonsuk at Rajavithi and Angus Turner at Lions Eye.

"Scaling a successful deep learning tool across three highly distinct settings — in India, Thailand and Australia — offers cross-cutting insights that may inform" the expansion of healthcare AI globally, the authors write.

Rather than run the deployments itself, Google licensed the model to three commercial partners, Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra, who operate ARDA in-country. Alphabet Inc. funded the underlying research. Two researchers we follow posted the paper within a day of publication.

This is a Comment, not a research article. No per-site accuracy figures or patient-outcome tallies appear in the abstract, and the million-patient total is not broken down by country.