Prashanth Ray

Medical Devices and Healthcare Researcher, Designer, and Executive | @lucid_implants @nuevatasurgical

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Surgical adverse events cost the US healthcare system ~$17B per year (Health Affairs). The fraction attributable to between-surgeon technical variation is large. Our ability to measure it at scale is zero.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

The decision matters more than the gesture. The gesture is what we currently record.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Building deep tech in India in 2026 feels different than in 2019. Component supply chain is still partial, but talent density is finally there. The Make-in-India moment for medical devices is now, not 2030.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

The Tier-3 hospital generalist in India who does 40 surgeries a month has no access to mentorship, no record of their cases, no way to benchmark against peers. That's the population that would benefit most from surgical AI. Also the one it's been least built for.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Most surgical AI work is downstream of capture. We are working upstream of it. The capture infrastructure for open surgery is the bottleneck. Everything else is the easy half.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@OriSilver AGI

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@coryalthoff Surgical Intelligence
https://t.co/wmJHjnqWwB

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Hardest engineering problem in surgical head-mounted capture: not optics. Not AI. It's six hours of comfortable wear without compromising the procedure.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@eddybuild Would love to chat :)

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Better models from existing data is a different project than expanding what the field can model in the first place.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Every five years the field discovers a new 'surgical AI breakthrough' and rebuilds it for laparoscopic cholecystectomy. There are 100+ surgical procedures with no equivalent of Cholec80.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

The next dataset of consequence in surgical AI will not be another laparoscopic corpus. It will be the first large-scale archive of open surgical video. Somebody will build it. We are.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

"If death ever finds me, may it find me where i felt most alive" - @nimsdai

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@lightsilver323 Surgical Intelligence Platform
https://t.co/KNGnyCPY2F

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@sridharfyi Building the intelligence layer for surgery.
The future of surgery is data-driven.
https://t.co/KNGnyCPY2F

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

@ZachShurtleff Surgical Intelligence Platform
https://t.co/zNUOrmQXQE

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

India performs 2-3 crore surgeries per year. There are roughly 20 surgical AI startups globally. Almost none are built for the volume distribution we actually have here.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

Question for anyone working in surgical AI: if you had a clean dataset of 10,000 open surgical procedures with phase annotations and surgeon-perspective video, what is the first thing you would build with it?

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

The Indian surgical workforce is one of the largest in the world. The Indian surgical data substrate is one of the smallest. This gap is where the next decade of work is.

[Prashanth Ray @asprashanthray]

The senior surgeon in Hyderabad who has done 3,000 thyroidectomies stopped using his recording camera because the cable kept catching on his assistant's gown. This is what 'feature requirements' actually looks like.