SDSC’s Founder and President, Dr. Daniel Donoho, recently travelled to India by invitation of the Vattikuti Foundation to represent SDSC at the 2025 Robotic Surgery Symposium in Jaipur. Throughout the trip, Dr. Donoho explored potential collaborations in India, Australia, and the US, and gained a firsthand look at both the immense challenges and exciting opportunities lying within India’s surgical ecosystem.
As a country of striking contrasts – home to world-class surgical expertise, yet vast disparities in access to care – India is undergoing a major transformation in its healthcare infrastructure. From conversations with surgeons and patients, and witnessing the reality of drastically variable patient care, the critical need for scalable, high-quality surgical solutions became extremely palpable. Engaging with this dynamic environment reinforced SDSC’s mission: to harness surgical data science to bridge gaps in surgical training, improve patient outcomes, and make cutting-edge technology accessible worldwide.
“The world urgently needs what we are offering. We have to get impact faster.” – Dan Donoho, MD
A Shared Vision for the Future of Surgery
The Vattikuti Foundation has demonstrated how effective training and knowledge-sharing initiatives can enhance surgical outcomes. By hosting such crucial symposiums, they are striving to ensure that surgical expertise is not limited to a select few, but widely disseminated across diverse healthcare settings. As a leader in robotic surgery training, Vattikuti Foundation is rapidly expanding into new disciplines, including neurosurgery. Their extensive fellowship programs, competitions, and database of over 19,000 robotic surgeries provide a strong foundation for SDSC’s data-driven analytics and AI-powered insights, opening up significant possibilities for collaboration.
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“The Vattikuti Foundation is a phenomenal exemplar of how high-quality surgical training can occur, and how surgical knowledge can be exchanged at present. We hope that with technologies like SDSC, foundations and groups like the Vattikuti Foundation can achieve greater reach and impact, and make the ideas and innovations of their surgeons more globally known.” – Dan Donoho, MD
Dan’s Talk: Bringing Data Science to the Operating Room
During the symposium, Dr. Donoho presented his vision to study quantitative data from surgical videos to improve surgical performance, as well as create automated systems capable of replicating human judgement and expertly assessing surgeons. He also discussed his exploration of this analytic method across other surgical visualisation devices (e.g. non-visible light cameras) and perioperative sensors (e.g. MRI scanners), which could also help enhance surgical precision.
Another critical theme was the importance of accessibility and scalability. “It’s not enough to create these expert systems, novel sensors, and devices. We have to create the communities, framework, and methodology of studying surgery at a global level,” said Dr. Donoho. SDSC’s approach is not solely about developing cutting-edge algorithms, but about building frameworks that ensure high-quality surgical data is usable and beneficial in a variety of clinical environments worldwide. Additionally, Dr. Donoho emphasized the need for multidirectional knowledge transfer. Traditional surgical training has often been centered in a few elite institutions, but valuable innovations are emerging worldwide. As such, SDSC is positioning the Surgical Video Platform (SVP) to foster a more open, global exchange of surgical techniques and expertise, including through its Platform Library, which is available to surgeons worldwide free of charge and to which they are encouraged to add their own surgical videos.
Bridging Global Expertise in Surgical Excellence
The conference reinforced SDSC’s standing as a global leader in surgical data science. There is clear demand for our expertise, and our integrated approach – combining AI, surgical analytics, and community-driven innovation – is widely recognized as unique and valuable.
Dr. Donoho’s experience at Vattikuti Foundation was more than just a conference appearance – it was a reaffirmation of our purpose. The potential for surgical data science to revolutionize training and assessment is immense, and the urgency for its implementation is undeniable. The 2025 Robotic Surgery Symposium was a powerful reminder that surgical excellence is not confined to any single country or institution. Innovation is occurring across the globe, and a key challenge is to connect these siloed examples of surgical excellence into a cohesive, data-driven network that benefits all surgical practitioners.
