Johnson & Johnson MedTech Advances Surgery AI Fund

Johnson & Johnson MedTech announced progress of its Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery to speed development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that improve surgical care.

The Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery QuickFire Challenge awarded Mayo Clinical and QAS.AI, who will both received funding and expert mentorship end eligibility for computing tools and tech to help advance their innovations. The Fund was revealed in June 2025 to support AI-driven innovation and is supported by J&J MedTech’s Polyphonic digital ecosystem.

The initative, joined by companies including NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS), build on the company’s work to advance open innovation and offer AI solutions a secure path into ORs.

One of the Fund’s first initiatives is to leverage the QuickFire Challenge program with an open call for surgical AI innovation. The effort garnered submissions from academics, researchers, startups, developers, and large companies in 29 countries.

Projects focused on perioperative decision-making, surgical efficiency, and data management and governance. Many explored use of multimodal AI—integrating video, imaging, audio, and clinical data—to enhance surgical precision and decision-making. Others emphasized reducing variability in outcomes, improving interoperability and scalability, and ensuring regulatory readiness.

Mayo Clinic is developing a computer vision model to spot surgical site infections and a range of post-op would complications across surgical specialties. QAS.AI is building real-time decision support tools to analyze intra-op vascular imaging data to help make quicker, more informed decisions during and after vascular procedures.

The second round of the Polyphonic AI Fund QuickFire Challenge opened this month. All first-round applicants will be invited to join a growing network of innovators focused on advancing surgical AI. This community will gain access to follow-on programming, mentorship, and networking opportunities.

“The Polyphonic AI Fund is about a global community rallying around the potential of AI to transform surgery,” said Shan Jegatheeswaran, SVP, global head of Digital, MedTech, Johnson & Johnson. “The passionate response we received in the first QuickFire Challenge reflects the growing excitement around surgical AI. We can now build on this response through the Polyphonic AI Fund to support an open developer community and create more opportunity to advance promising projects.”