Johnson & Johnson announced on May 21 a collaboration with the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi to launch a global program aimed at developing an open surgical intelligence network. This initiative will establish Abu Dhabi as the first node in a worldwide infrastructure designed to accelerate artificial intelligence innovation throughout the surgery experience.
The partnership integrates Johnson & Johnson’s Polyphonic open digital ecosystem with technology partners such as Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA. The Polyphonic Surgery application is expected to be deployed into Abu Dhabi’s intelligent health system, connecting operating rooms across the emirate to a centralized surgical intelligence system.
Through this platform, high-fidelity video and multimodal data from relevant procedures will be curated, labeled, and managed within a governed infrastructure. The goal is to enable responsible AI development by continuously collecting insights generated before, during, and after surgeries. The ecosystem aims to support advances in open, laparoscopic, and robotic surgery by combining deep surgical expertise with an open architecture.
“Today marks an important step forward for the global community to advance innovation for surgical teams and in service of patients,” said Hani Abouhalka, company group chair for Surgery at MedTech, Johnson & Johnson. “No single company, hospital, or developer can do this alone. We must bring together innovative health systems, technology leaders, clinicians and researchers with a drive to start now and serve the world.”
Hospitals including Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, PureHealth, Mediclinic Group, and NMC Healthcare will deploy Polyphonic across their operating rooms. Participating institutions will use the solution for capturing surgical video data while enabling real-time collaboration among medical professionals. Each case added through these tools contributes structured anonymized data that could support future AI development in surgical care both locally and globally.
“This program builds on Abu Dhabi’s intelligent health system where clinical care, data, AI and research are connected to deliver impact at scale,” said H.E. Dr. Noura Khamis Al Ghaithi of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi. “By extending the intelligent OR network across hospitals we are standardizing capabilities…creating a continuous learning system where every procedure has the potential to improve the next.”
Shan Jegatheeswaran of MedTech at Johnson & Johnson said: “Working with the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi…has helped us accelerate building the first node of a global surgical network…Our role is to create conditions for leading minds in medicine…to do their best work together in service of better outcomes for patients everywhere.”
The initiative reflects broader efforts by stakeholders in healthcare technology toward creating coordinated networks that facilitate responsible aggregation of clinical data while supporting scalable improvements from individual operating rooms.
