Building the Smart Operating Room of the Future

Building the Smart Operating Room of the Future: A HIVE SaMD Platform for AI-Driven, Fluorescence-Guided, and Robotic Surgery Powered by NVIDIA Isaac

 My capstone project focused on designing HIVE, a proposed next-generation Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) platform for the integrated operating room. The core objective was to develop a realistic strategic blueprint for how Karl Storz could combine surgical video, fluorescence-guided imaging, robotic inputs, and artificial intelligence into a single, interoperable ecosystem that improves safety, efficiency, and clinical decision making in surgery. The project examined how a collaboration between Karl Storz and NVIDIA’s healthcare ecosystem could enable real-time analytics and surgical guidance using technologies such as NVIDIA Isaac, Holoscan, and IGX class edge computing. I integrated technical architecture, regulatory expectations for SaMD and AI, clinical workflow considerations, payer and value-based care requirements, and a staged commercialization roadmap. The result was a business and implementation plan that links cutting-edge digital surgery concepts to practical steps a medical device company could take to develop, validate, and scale an AI-enabled integrated operating room platform.