AI & ML Open Release

SurgΣ is a massive open-source release of 5.98M multimodal conversations and foundation models for surgical intelligence.

arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.16822

Zhitao Zeng, Mengya Xu, Jian Jiang, Pengfei Guo, Yunqiu Xu, Zhu Zhuo, Chang Han Low, Yufan He, Dong Yang, Chenxi Lin, Yiming Gu, Jiaxin Guo, Yutong Ban, Daguang Xu, Qi Dou, Yueming Jin

The Takeaway

It democratizes high-scale surgical AI research by providing a unified schema and unprecedented volume of annotated clinical data. This release moves the field beyond niche, task-specific models toward general-purpose surgical assistants.

From the abstract

Surgical intelligence has the potential to improve the safety and consistency of surgical care, yet most existing surgical AI frameworks remain task-specific and struggle to generalize across procedures and institutions. Although multimodal foundation models, particularly multimodal large language models, have demonstrated strong cross-task capabilities across various medical domains, their advancement in surgery remains constrained by the lack of large-scale, systematically curated multimodal d