Google's ARDA eye AI crosses one million patients screened

Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, the deep-learning tool known as ARDA, has now been used on more than one million patients across hospitals in India, Thailand and Australia, according to a Comment published in Nature Medicine on 23 September 2026.

The piece is co-written by clinicians at the three anchor deployment sites, the Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai, Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, and Lions Outback Vision at the Lions Eye Institute in Western Australia, together with the ARDA team at Google in Mountain View. Rather than operate the screenings itself, Google licenses the model to three commercial partners: Forus Health, AuroLab and Perceptra. The authors say the operators are targeting six million AI-assisted screenings across India and Thailand within ten years.

The authors frame the paper as practical lessons rather than a trial result. '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.