SURGhub Drives Effort to Make AI Work for Surgical Care in Remote Settings
By joining the MOOVE initiative, led by the LIGHT Lab at Harvard University and EPFL, SURGhub is enabling the first-ever effort to validate large language models (LLMs) specifically for surgical care in remote and low-resource settings.
SURGhub is driving the surgical component of a global initiative to train an AI model for use in remote surgical care — part of the MOOVE initiative led by the LiGHT Lab at Harvard University and EPFL.
A Global Effort, A Surgical First
The Massive Online Open Validation and Evaluation (MOOVE) initiative, led by the LiGHT Lab at Harvard University and EPFL, brings together universities, hospitals, and technology leaders to rigorously test how large language models perform in healthcare. While AI models are increasingly used in medicine, their safety and accuracy in real-world, resource-limited environments remain largely untested.
SURGhub is bridging this gap. As the UN Global Surgery Learning Hub, SURGhub is uniquely positioned to lead a dedicated surgical care use case within MOOVE. For the first time, clinicians in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will test how AI models respond to realistic surgical and perioperative scenarios drawn directly from their clinical environments.
Focus on Limited-Resource Settings
For surgical teams working in rural or under-resourced hospitals, access to specialist advice, up-to-date guidelines, and decision support is often limited. AI tools—if validated for these contexts—could offer safe, reliable, and equitable support to frontline providers where it matters most.
This initiative represents a critical step toward making AI work for surgical care workers in remote settings, not just in well-resourced hospitals in high-income countries.
Call for Participation
The Global Surgery Foundation (GSF) and SURGhub invite surgeons and anaesthesiologists with at least five years of clinical experience in LMICs to join this pioneering effort.
Participation is currently by invitation only, but expressions of interest and enquiries can be directed to: s.hofbauer@globalsurgeryfoundation.org.
Informing the Safe Use of AI
As part of MOOVE, SURGhub will generate the first-ever insights into how LLMs perform in surgical care in low-resource settings—informing not only the safe use of AI but also shaping the design of tools that can truly serve frontline surgical teams worldwide.
This milestone underscores SURGhub’s mission: to accelerate equitable access to surgical education, innovation, and system strengthening through collaboration at the global level.
Join the global community at www.surghub.org
SURGhub is an initiative of the Global Surgery Foundation (GSF) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), supported by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and in association with the Johnson & Johnson Foundation.
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